eBay Hopes Google’s AMP Can Make Its Mobile Pages Faster

EBay wants to make sure that its mobile pages load as fast as possible, and in order to ensure that it stays ahead of the curve, it has recently updated some of its mobile pages using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology, according to Internet Retailer.

“Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way we access information, and today, people consume a tremendous amount of news on their phones,” Google said in a statement when it unveiled AMP in Oct. 2015. “Publishers around the world use the mobile web to reach these readers, but the experience can often leave a lot to be desired. Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader — and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions. That’s because advertisers on these websites have a hard time getting consumers to pay attention to their ads when the pages load so slowly that people abandon them entirely.”

“Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open-source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content, like video, animations and graphics, to work alongside smart ads and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant — no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.”

AMP’s pages can load “super-fast” because its HTML code contains certain restrictions that do not slow the pages down, such as not allowing custom JavaScript coding. AMP Cache is Google’s content delivery network, and it validates each page without AMP having to rely on “external resources,” like a technology vendor that could be trying to push certain products, according to AMP’s description on Google. Again, all things that typically slow mobile pages down from loading faster.

And eBay is jumping on board AMP because its online marketplace website is “content-rich” and consumers can benefit from the faster mobile loading times AMP will help it bring about, Senthil Padmanabhan, an eBay engineer, told Internet Retailer.

“Though it was initially targeted more toward publishers, there was no restriction on trying it out for eCommerce,” Padmanabhan said. “When we opened this idea to Google and the community, they were very supportive of it. This positive reaction encouraged us to start looking into AMP technology for the eCommerce world.”