I’ve received a very interesting fashion report benchmarking the yearly performance of 300+ retailers globally, and how these trends relate to Australian Online Retail.
Here some of the most interesting outtakes
- Australia is 6 seconds slower than the rest of the world!
- Page size grew by 6%
- Third party hosts increased by 27%
Despite all we know about shopper demand for speedy sites and applications, Australian retail sites are the slowest in the world.
During the course of 2015, local retail sites grew the average home page response time by 51%, from 5.47 seconds in January to 8.26 seconds in December.
In an attempt to better entertain, service and connect with consumers, Australian retailers are adding more features and functionality to their sites, but it’s making those sites more complex, heavier and slower to respond.
Benchmarking the digital performance of Australian retailers
Worldwide consumer expectation demands a retail site to load in 3 seconds otherwise 46% of shoppers will shop elsewhere. If retailers reduce site response times from 8 to 2 seconds then they will see a 74% increase in site conversions.
All technical changes and advancements to our digital marketing channels centre on this question: ‘What will be the impact on the customer experience?’ We continually test and monitor the performance of all components of our website so we know exactly what to abandon and what we need to optimise. Gopal Brugalette, Performance Engineer, Norstrom
Data breakdown: The global slow down
In 2015, retailers increased the global average homepage response time by 23%. Australian retail sites were consistently the slowest and grew the local average response time by 51%.
Data breakdown: Page size growth
Australian retailers had some of the largest page sizes in the world in 2015, growing by 6% from 2.24MB to 2.38MB. While the average global page size grew by 10%, Japan and Korea were the only countries with larger page size averages than local retailers.
The results are interesting for all industries, and were featured on Sky Business News prior to Christmas. View Interview
You can download the free report.
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