Speed is king on Black Friday. Seconds can make the difference between missing that 60" Flatscreen or spending $25 more for a Lego set. The fastest path to Black Friday deals is though an app. There are apps dedicated Black Friday deals, and most every major retailer has their own Black Friday deals right inside their app. What are the fastest apps for Black Friday shopping?
Major Retail Apps
Of course, the most popular apps on Black Friday are the standalone major retailing apps such as Target, Amazon, Walmart and Jet. These apps are powered by some of the smartest app teams on the planet, but there is still quite a bit of performance variance between them. All things being equal, you might be able to snag a Black Friday deal faster with a faster app.
Here we measure the average page load time inside the app. Anything < 300ms, a third of a second, and you won’t notice much lag. Anything over 500ms, you might be annoyed, and over 2 seconds, you might miss a deal or close the app.
Target: 340ms
Amazon: 390ms
Walmart: 640ms
Jet: 710ms
These are the average performance numbers. Some further analysis showed that if you need to search for your deals, Target also has fastest search page. But, once that gift is in your cart, Walmart had the faster cart and checkout experience. If you are a security nut and always log out of your app when done using it, Amazon’s app has the fastest login to get you back into the Black Friday deals. If you are one of those folks that need to read every review before buying something, Walmart had the fastest loading review pages.
Note that we measured the performance of other major retail apps, and decided not to point out the slowest ones. These four retail apps are good bets for Black Friday shopping when it comes to app performance.
Black Friday Apps
There is an app for everything and for Black Friday there are many dedicated apps that show you deals across multiple retailers. You’d better pick your Black Friday app wisely — some of them are as slow as chestnuts on an open fire.
Fastest Black Friday Apps
Retale: 300ms
Black Friday 2016 - Best Deals: 310ms
Coupons & Black Friday 2016: 420ms
Not-So-Fast Black Friday Apps
We won’t pick on the slower dedicated Black Friday apps by detailing their lack of speed, but think twice before depending on an app not listed above. Many of the slower apps can take as long as 1.2 seconds on average to load a page, with the slowest taking over 4 full seconds.
A Note to App Makers
A study by Twinprime showed over half of users abandoned a mobile transaction in 2014. 37% of those abandoned transactions were due to app performance. A little math shows that an estimated $9B dollars in potential transactions were abandoned due to app performance in 2015.
How did we measure all this?
Most app teams have difficulty measuring their own app performance, let alone the performance of competitive apps. At Appdiff.com, we have built smart little software robots, powered by AI, that have been trained to automatically interact with apps just like a person. As the robots explore an app, they measure the performance of every transition from the user’s perspective. The bots measure thousands of these in-app transitions and report back their findings. The bots can even tell if a new version of an app got slower or faster. If you’d like a full performance analysis of your app just email us: hi@appdiff.com.
— Jason Arbon, CEO Appdiff
Reference
Twinprime study on abandoned transactions
