Holiday Shopping Wrap-Up: Apple Makes Top Performing E-Commerce Site List, Amazon Excels On Mobile

According to the end-of-season benchmarks from Compuware’s web performance division, Apple.com was among the top three best-performing retail websites during the 2011 holiday season. Meanwhile, Amazon made the list for the top m-commerce sites.

The sites were ranked from November 21st through Christmas Day using Compuware’s Gomez Performance Index which compares how U.S. retailers’ sites perform in comparison with typical non-peak periods.

As we previously reported, 2011 was a record-breaking season in terms of online spending, with $35.27 billion in sales with web retailers from November 1st through December 26th. The impact of the increased number of shoppers was definitely felt, says Compuware. Its Gomez Performance Satisfaction Index, which measures consumer satisfaction with site performance, degraded during the 2011 holiday period. This was, in part, due to the fact that half of the top retailers increased their homepage’s size after Cyber Monday, which caused slower response times. Those who didn’t do so saw better consumer satisfaction results.

The top 10 retailers’ average Gomez Performance Satisfaction Index (GPSI) for the season was 52, compared with an average of 35 for the top 50.

As for the top retailer websites, on the e-commerce front the top three were:

1. JC Penney
2. Apple
3. Dell

JC Penney and Apple were the only two sites that performed better than the baseline, Compuware notes.

On the mobile front, sites stayed stable through Cyber Monday, but performance decreased afterwards with the biggest drops on December 5th and then again from December 16 – 22.

The top ranking mobile sites (on smartphones) for the same period were:

1. Sears
2. Amazon
3. Dell