Are you taking advantage of holiday opportunities?

Mobile websites are important for all retailers because they’re far more discoverable than apps, which require a download from an app store.

During the holidays, you may be tempted to collect buyer information. Although this is a common practice in social retail, companies should weigh what’s gained in collecting junk data against the potential loss of real prospects by introducing multiple barriers to consideration of your merchandise.

Be sure to utilize an integrated and branded campaign across multiple platforms to reach as many potential customers as possible during the holiday season. In addition, mobile coupons are on the rise and can be a perfect addition to your mobile strategy this holiday season.

In a recent infographic, Microsoft Tag reported that 20% of smartphone users currently acquire and redeem mobile coupons on a regular basis, with that number expected to grow to 30% by 2013.


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Speed and Tenacity: the Apple iPad Outage

We’ve heard a lot recently about the importance of speed and performance when it comes to online retail. The New York Times highlighted research from Microsoft claiming that 250 milliseconds—a mere eye blink—could make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer. And a popular infographic touts that Amazon would stand to lose $1.6 billion in sales per year from a 1 second web page delay. Our friends at Walmart.com have also shared some awesome research linking web performance to conversion.

These statistics are welcome news for the web performance community. But sometimes they don’t apply. With Apple, a lot of rules don’t apply.

To Apple’s credit, the Apple store normally runs very quickly—averaging well less than 2 seconds for total User Experience Time and less a second for Time to First Paint. (The Apple Store is a member of the Keynote Retail Performance Index, measured with Keynote Transaction Perspective.)

Your product/service is unique. And your customers are also unique. Keynote web load testing consultants dig into web analytics to model user behavior. They consider familiarity, tenacity, interaction speed and connection speed when developing virtual user profiles. It may be unrealistic for you to understand how different levels of performance impact your various customer types across all these variables. But if you can begin to understand them, you’ll be in a better position for setting ongoing performance goals and SLAs—especially around tolerances for outliers from your averages.

Source: Keynote Systems

Competitive monitoring and analysis with precise and accurate data

Mobile network quality is often cited as the top reason in selecting a mobile carrier. Consequently vast resources are allocated to monitoring internal operations. But if that’s all that’s being done, you’re only getting half the picture.

Carriers and infrastructure providers looking to get a comprehensive view of the performance and end-user experience take the additional step of benchmarking against their competitors. It requires time, resources, and expertise to analyze data and make actionable decisions. This testing helps you understand industry standards and take the actions needed to stay ahead of the curve. After all, maintaining the highest standard in service performance is of paramount importance when it comes to retaining customer loyalty. An important step is improving the user experience for mobile content, services, and applications begins with mobile monitoring and collecting the right mix of performance data. 

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Mobile Monitoring & Analysis - Develop your own expertise in-house.

The first step in improving the user experience for mobile content, services, and applications begins with mobile monitoring and collecting the right mix of performance data. Once you’ve collected that data, the next step is to understand it and make the right decisions to improve your service quality. This is where the challenge lies. It requires time, resources, and expertise to analyze data and make actionable decisions. You can add headcount and develop your own expertise in-house. However, an outsourced solution is often more cost-effective and can instantly bring a broader base of knowledge right to your fingertips.

The mobile portal adapts the company’s standard portal to a form factor that works with mobile devices and can be accessed over various mobile carrier networks. When a user makes a request using a mobile device, the server automatically determines what device the request has come from and returns content that has been adapted to that device—for example by offering fewer graphics and text fitted to the mobile device’s smaller screen.