2019 Q1 Mobile

Commerce
Insights Report
Ecommerce Trends and Stats
from Q1 2019
This edition of the Mobile Commerce
Insights Report is all about performance.

You’ll learn:
• How shoppers think about performance

• Where to really focus optimization efforts

• How page speed affects the purchase funnel

Performance metrics must
value the shopper
There’s no shortage of articles about the
importance of performance to a business’
bottom line, yet there’s still a fractured view
of what performance means across a retail
organization and the industry at large.
For some, performance refers to technical
metrics like full page load or first paint.
For others, performance refers to metrics
like conversion rate, average order value,
and revenue. While both are a part of
performance, you leave the actual customer
out of the equation when you only account
for technical or business metrics, because
the shopper only notices whether your site
is easy to use or not.
While these metrics are easy to measure —
and are a great pulse check on the health of
your site — they’re only part of the picture.
The most valuable way to think about
performance is to consider who it has the
biggest impact on — your shopper.
Performance metrics must value the shopper
If your user experience is lacking, there’s a
bug in your checkout, or your customer has to
navigate 15 pages to find what they’re looking
for, even the fastest mobile site won’t convert
(even if your technical metrics appear spot
on). This is where time-to-task completion
comes in.
= +
Time to task Technical
completion performance
Time-to-task completion (TTC) is the sum
of two parts: technical performance (the
time spent waiting for the site to load), and
user experience (the time a user spends
performing actions). It’s a holistic view of the
actual shopping experience.
User
experience
Performance Average Mobify time to task improvement

metrics must
value the
shopper
Our research has shown that
implementing a Progressive 117% 24%
Web App (PWA) can improve FASTER FASTER
a shopper’s ability to find a
product by close to 1 minute,
and can also reduce the
time to checkout by close to FINDABILITY CHECKOUT
1 minute. That’s over 100% 50s* 54s*
*Median Values
faster for a shopper to find
a product and 25% faster for
them to checkout.
High-traffic Percentage of total pages visited by page type

pages demand
better UX
PLP 43%
The home page, product
listing pages (PLPs), and PDP 29%

product description pages

Other 12%
(PDPs) make up the majority
of shopper traffic, so focus Home 9%
your UX optimization efforts
on these pages. Checkout 4%

Cart 3%

0 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 50%

Optimizing UX
requires agility
Retailers should be doing frequent experimentation and
deployments to continuously optimize the user experience.
To enable this, it’s best to have a customer-facing experience
that’s decoupled from the backend – otherwise known as
a headless commerce architecture. This ensures teams can
be more agile as a simple UX change won’t require a heavy
redeploy of a backend system.
Product pages Median page load speed by page type

have a need for

speed
PLP 1.54
PWAs are fast, especially when
it comes to subsequent page PDP 2.22
loads, so they can help ensure
Other 1.6
that your UX is optimized for
performance. PDPs and PLPs Home 0.76
have the lowest load time on
average because they typically Checkout 0.37

have the most images, so it’s

Cart 1.01
important to make sure you’re
continuously optimizing for
0 .25 .5 .75 1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5
performance since they also
Median Subsequent Page Load Speed (in seconds)
have the highest traffic.
Popular landing Percentage of landing pages by page type

pages need to
be fast
PLP 23%
The home page and product
pages are great targets for PDP 27%
content and speed optimization,
considering they are the pages Other 22%

that customers are landing

Home 27%
on first. Accelerated Mobile
Pages (AMP) are the best way Checkout < 1%
to ensure the first page that a
Cart 1%
shopper lands on from search
results is lightning fast.
0 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30%
High bounce rates Bounce rate by page type

signal a problem
There are many reasons for a
PLP 36.4%
shopper to bounce, from slow
loading pages to a disconnect PDP 64.1%
between expectation and actual
page content. Spend time Other 28.9%

optimizing your navigation and

Home 13%
site search so shoppers can find
what they’re looking for and Checkout 57%
explore new products quickly. It
Cart 56.9%
might be worth investing in Real
User Monitoring tests to see
how actual shoppers behave on 0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%

your site.
How page load Page load speeds on cart, checkout, and purchase pages

speed affects the

purchase funnel 60%

Now we look into how page load 50%

speeds could be affecting the Checkout

Micro-conversion rate
40%
way customers move through
your funnel. 30%
Purchase
Since the shopper journey can 20%

be quite nonlinear, we looked

10%
at micro-conversion rates for Cart
the cart (converting from initial 0
browsing pages to cart page),
10 15 20 25 30
the checkout (converting from 5
Page Load (seconds)
cart pages to checkout) and the
purchase page (checkout pages
to purchase).
How page load speed affects
the purchase funnel
Load times have a varying impact on
movement down the last few funnel stages.
The largest dropoff is in shoppers going
from browsing pages to cart, and anything
more than a second of wait time will highly
impact the number of shoppers who
proceed to the cart stage.
There is a higher tolerance for page load
times for shoppers who have made the
commitment to go to the checkout and
then make the purchase, but the checkout
is not a place to ignore when it comes to
the shopper journey, as we have seen with
our PWA A/B tests. We A/B tested PWAs
against responsive sites, and saw different
results if the PWA was implemented across
the entire site (home to checkout) versus
just part of the site (home to cart, with
checkout still being responsive).
 How page load speed affects the purchase funnel
The conversion rates increased across the board when the full journey PWA was compared to
the responsive site. However, when retailers only implemented a PWA experience from home to
cart, the results weren’t as consistently positive.

Responsive vs. PWA: % Change in Mobile Conversion Rate Responsive vs. Home-to-Cart PWA: % Change in Mobile Conversion Rate

Mobify Boost A/B

Mobify
TestBoost
Analysis
A/B Test Analysis Mobify Boost Home
Mobify
toBoost
Cart Only
Home A/toBCart
Test Only A/ B Test

Mobile User Conversion Rate Lift

Mobile User Conversion Rate Lift

Mobile User Conversion Rate Lift

Mobile User Conversion Rate Lift

50% 50% 20% 20%

19% 19%
46% 46%

40% 40%
10% 10%

30% 30%
3% 3%
26% 26% 0% 0%
20% 20%

14% 14% -10% -10%

10% 10% -11% -11%
7% 7%

-20% -20%

30
$
30
$$
40 40$50
$
50$60
$
60$70
$
70
$ 0
$
50
0
$ $
100
$ $
50 $$
150
100 200
150
$ $
250
$$
200 250
$

AOV (USD) AOV (USD)

AOV (USD) AOV (USD)
How page load speed affects
the purchase funnel
Shoppers expect a unified customer
experience. If they get a fast, app-like
experience up until the cart, then the slower
responsive checkout experience, the slow
performance can be even more apparent
(and unpleasant).
A great way to think about this is to
visualize shopping in a physical store.
Retailers need to strategically merchandise
the products, optimize the sales team and
fitting room experience, and make sure the
journey to pay is efficient.
It’s the whole shopping experience that
matters, not just one part of it — and it’s the
same thing online. You can’t optimize only
one part of the site and expect it to have an
impact on the whole experience.
Questions? Get in touch.
Mobify is an enterprise Front-end as a Service that provides a
headless commerce architecture and customer-first experiences with
Progressive Web Apps, Accelerated Mobile Pages, and native apps.

Get in Touch to Learn More

NA: hello@mobify.com 1 (866) 502 5880

UK: emea@mobify.com +44 (0) 1189 000715

Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved.

www.mobify.com