Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Is Best Buy’s site appropriate for what its audience wants? It greets customers with a pleasant holding page that declares “The Best Buy app will be done loading your deals in just a second.” It takes more than a second. But for someone who wants to shop at Best Buy, it’s not an excruciating wait. The site is heavy with options, but is that necessarily a bad thing? After all, if the customers aren’t leaving, there doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Matt Poepsel, Gomez’s vice president for performance strategies, said that mobile site performance is generally impacted by two very distinct areas. The more visibly obvious area is the size of the download for the homepage and subsequent pages, usually dictated by the number and size of images and colors.

But an equally impactful factor is the number of connections between the mobile device and the Web servers delivering the content. That’s generally a matter of third parties, such as advertisers (not a typical M-Commerce issue, but it’s there occasionally), Web analytics, rich media services and ratings/reviews companies, Poepsel said.

One problem is that site management often tries to apply lessons learned in E-Commerce to M-Commerce, and that doesn’t always work. Consider that issue with the number of hops between the device and the server. Web browsers have gotten much more sophisticated about such matters, while mobile browsers are still in their infancy. Consider, too, the difference between the latest browsers today and the earliest Mosaic browsers from the mid-1990s.

“Today’s browsers have become highly evolved. Sites can trick [these modern Web] browsers and they can be made to artificially open up more connections as a performance optimization technique,” Poepsel said. “This simply does not work that well in mobile. On the mobile Web, you’re really trying to have a minimal number” of hops between the device and the server.

The question of how large a landing page will be well tolerated is also not an easy one to answer, because it varies from category to category. One question that is the same from the Web to mobile: Is it better to have a quick-loading homepage and to place the slower elements deeper within the site (on the rationale that once on the site and clicking, a visitor is committed and less likely to abandon) or to delay the load but have a more powerful initial image and then have a faster experience?

“It comes down to ‘Pay me now or pay me later,'” Poepsel said. “It’s the difference between Google and Yahoo.”