Mobile Cliff Coming Black Friday for Retailers?? - Keynote Sees Performance Problems Ahead

SAN MATEO, Calif. --(Business Wire)--

Keynote® (Nasdaq:KEYN), the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud testing & monitoring, today announced its 2012 Holiday Retail Mobile Performance Forecast and the outlook appears challenging for retailers.

The 2012 holiday shopping season is anticipated to be the year for mobile, as large numbers of holiday shoppers use their smartphones for research and purchasing. Adobe (News - Alert) recently predicted that sales from mobile devices will rise 110% to account for 21% of all online sales. Two-thirds of those mobile sales will come through tablets, and the other third through smartphones. "Showrooming" is the trend du jour in retail - using your smartphone to compare prices and products before purchase - making mobile a big part of the brick and mortar experience.

But retailers may not be ready. Keynote predicts that slow site performance will leave many retailers - and mobile shoppers - crying in their eggnog.

The expectations for mobile commerce this holiday season is high:

Online retail sales are forecasted to be $68.4 billion, 15% over last year. (Forrester (News - Alert))
20% of online sales predicted to come from mobile devices. (IMRG/Cap Gemini)
Four in five mobile device owners will use their devices in some way to assist with shopping - including show rooming, couponing, reviews and research. (Google/Ipsos)

Meanwhile a Keynote User Study found that user expectations for site performance across smartphones and tablets are also high:

64% of smartphone users want an under four second page download
60% of tablet users want an under three second page download

So are online retailers ready to give the gift of mobile website performance and delight their customers looking to compare and buy online Keynote's Worldwide Mobile Retail Index of 24 sites suggests most customers will be disappointed. Right now, the average response time (measured over the last three months) remains at 11.8 seconds. Let's call it the Keynote mobile performance gap.

"Based on this extreme gap between site performance and users' expectations, we believe this year's contribution from mobile will represent a significantly lost opportunity in goodwill and sales," said Aaron Rudger, senior manager for mobile web performance at Keynote. "While some sites have taken mobile web performance seriously and are delivering great experiences, the vast majority are still far behind the curve."

With so much potential revenue riding on retailers' desktop and mobile websites, Keynote will be monitoring both the desktop websites and mobile websites of leading retailers throughout the holiday sales season, and will be available to the media for data and commentary. For inquiries contact Dan Berkowitz, dberkowitz@keynote.com, or Ann O'Leary, ann.oleary@keynote.com.

About Keynote

Keynote® (NASDAQ:KEYN) is the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud testing & monitoring. Keynote maintains the world's largest on-demand performance monitoring and testing infrastructure for Web and mobile sites comprised of over 7,000 measurement computers and mobile devices in over 275 locations around the world that enable companies to continuously improve the online and mobile experience. Known as 'The Mobile and Internet Performance Authority™,' Keynote offers three market-leading product platforms:

Keynote Perspective® provides on-demand performance monitoring for enterprise Web and mobile sites including online portals, e-commerce sites and B2B sites. Over 2,000 customers rely on Keynote Perspective services to know precisely how their websites, content, and applications perform on actual browsers, networks, and mobile devices.

Keynote DeviceAnywhere® provides the industry's only true cloud-based platform for testing and monitoring the functionality, usability, performance and availability of mobile applications and websites. It's suite of mobile testing solutions is used by over 1,000 mobile developers and enterprises to deliver quality mobile applications and services to the mobile channel.

Keynote SIGOS® offers active end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) testing and monitoring solutions for mobile, fixed and VoIP communications. Its SITE and Global Roamer products are used by over 200 network operators, content providers, carriers and regulators in over 100 countries worldwide.

Keynote's 4,000 customers represent top Internet and mobile companies and include American Express (News - Alert), AT&T, Disney, eBay, E*TRADE, Expedia, Google, Microsoft, SonyEricsson, T-Mobile and Vodafone. Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at http://www.keynote.com/ or by phone in the U.S. at 1-800-KEYNOTE.

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