Keynote Competitive Research, the global leader in solutions for continuously improving the Internet and mobile experience, has announced the first ever smartphone mobile commerce index. Walmart's mobile site led the Index for the week of September 13 with a perfect score of 1,000 points, an average load time of 3.18 seconds and an availability of 99.37 percent. Internet Retailer, the leading e-retailing magazine, is featuring the new weekly Index on its site under an exclusive arrangement with Keynote. Click here and select Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index to see complete results for all 15 merchants.

From the Press Release:

The Keynote Mobile Commerce Index is a weekly performance ranking of leading and up-and-coming US retail mobile Web sites being accessed using popular wireless device profiles, including the Apple iPhone.

Internet Retailer, the leading e-retailing magazine, is featuring the new weekly Index on its site under an exclusive arrangement with Keynote. The new mobile commerce Index is important as it underscores the critical issue of mobile site performance and establishes, for the first time, and in a very public way, performance benchmarks across a representative sampling of large -- and some not-so-large, but growing in popularity -- mobile Web sites. Walmart's mobile site led the Index for the week of September 13 with a perfect score of 1,000 points, an average load time of 3.18 seconds and an availability of 99.37 percent.

The Index shows the average response times and success rates for downloading the homepage of selected mobile commerce sites on popular smartphones using Keynote's commercially available mobile performance monitoring solution, Mobile Application Perspective. The response times and success rates are then combined to provide an overall score. The m-commerce sites that appear in the Index were selected to provide a benchmark for companies to compare their mobile site performance against a representative sampling of e-retailers.

Desperate times for retailers. USA Today reports:

Whether to draw the masses or woo the upscale shopper, retailers are pulling out all the stops — and stunts — to snag customers for the post-Thanksgiving start of holiday shopping.
More competition and less distinctiveness are driving gimmicks.

"These are desperation moves," says Erik Gordon, marketing professor at Johns Hopkins University. "Everyone is your competitor these days, and no retailer can afford to lose market share."

With online sellers open 24/7, many stores will open at 5 a.m. or earlier Friday. Some even will open on Thanksgiving.