Consumers in Hong Kong, Singapore and India are prolific mobile shoppers, with 84% of smartphone owners in the three markets using their devices to browse m-commerce sites weekly, a survey shows.
But the survey by managed cloud company Rackspace shows that consumers often find browsing a frustrating experience, with 78% reporting experiencing technical issues when browsing sites on their smartphone.
Over a quarter of consumers across the three markets said they would not make purchases from an m-commerce site if they experience a technical issue, and an overwhelming 93% said their perception of the brand is negatively affected if its site consistently has problems.
Rackspace Asia Pacific managing director Ajit Melakode said this highlights the importance of a consistent, functional m-commerce site.
“E-commerce companies need to realize the severity of poorly managed m-commerce sites and the impact it’s having on consumers. Downtime or timed-out errors are not only causing consumer frustrations, but they’re also enabling consumers to forgo purchasing,” he said.
Commonly encountered technical problems include slow page loading – the most prevalent issue named by 73% of the Hong Kong respondents – followed by scaling issues, then page freezing and glitches.
Nearly all consumers feel frustration when encountering one of the issues, with one fifth typically closing the site and moving on, and nearly one third stating they'd visit the webpage on their desktop instead.
Consumers are most likely (40%) to be willing to wait 6-10 seconds for an m-commerce page to load, with only a quarter willing to wait longer than 15 seconds before leaving.