The study found that Best Buy, Sears and Barnes & Noble rank No. 1, 2 and 3 in home page performance, respectively. Walmart, Best Buy and Amazon rank No. 1, 2 and 3 in search results performance, respectively.
 
Foot Locker, Barnes & Noble and Best Buy Rank No. 1, 2 and 3 in product information performance, respectively, Keynote found.
 
Keynote’s in-depth study of the performance of sites during the holiday season found that overall, shopping on mobile Web sites still has a lot of catching up to do in both download performance and uptime when compared to the performance of connected Web sites.

The company measured the performance of 10 retail mobile Web sites during the critical weeks from Nov. 18 – Jan. 4.

The 10 sites included in The Keynote Mobile Holiday Shopping Study were: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Foot Locker, Musicians Friend, Sears, Target and Walmart.

The study measured the download performance for three pages on each site: loading the mobile site home page, searching for products and getting information about a specific product.

Measurements were taken from two markets (New York and San Francisco) using AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon wireless data connections.

Home page average times on the study ranged from 8.3 seconds in the best case of Best Buy to 34.4 seconds in the worst case.

Search results ranged from 4.5 seconds for Walmart to 37.9 seconds. And product information ranged from 5.7 seconds turned in by Foot Locker to 26.8 seconds.

Consumers on the wired Web are used to much, much faster times, and often expect pages to load in two seconds or less.

Even the best mobile Web sites take two to three times as long as that despite being optimized heavily for the mobile phone experience, and the worst sites are taking over a half a minute on average to load each page.

The Keynote study also showed that mobile Web sites have much higher error rates than non-mobile sites.

The overall range of availability was between 97.6 percent for Foot Locker to just 74.7 percent.

Consumers on the wired Web expect 99.5 percent  or better availability, so even the very best mobile Web sites are not fully meeting expectations.

In fact, in the Keynote study only two mobile sites achieved an overall availability better than 90 percent , and three sites were below 80 percent  overall.