Despite a surge in mobile traffic – which now accounts for nearly 20% of all e-commerce traffic – a quarter of the top 100 UK retailers have yet to optimise their e-commerce websites for mobile devices. Although this is a 26% increase on the 50% of UK retailers who had optimised for mobile by March 2013, UK retailers still lag behind the US, where 100% of the top US retailers have optimised.
So finds the annual UK Retailer Mobile Optimisation report by Skava, a provider of digital commerce, digital marketing, and digital in-store technologies to brands including Staples, GAP and Banana Republic.
The report suggest that, in Europe, some retailers are still denying the importance of mobile as a significant source of revenue, yet leading UK retailer Argos generated £400 million in m-commerce last year, accounting for 10% of overall e-commerce revenue.
In fact, according to eMarketer’s latest forecasts, worldwide business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce sales will increase by 20.1% in 2014, reaching $1.500 trillion. In the US, 12% of overall e-commerce revenue is now made up of m-commerce sales according to BI Intelligence.
“The increase in e-commerce revenue overall is masking the loss of revenue through poorly converting mobile websites,” says Arish Ali, Skava CEO and Co-founder. “Simply creating a mobile website is no longer efficient, but retailers must build mobile optimized websites with a conversion-first approach. The launch of a mobile website is not the end of a retailer¹s mobile strategy, but just the beginning. Like e-commerce websites before them, they require constant updates based on analysis of user behavior to create a seamless shopping experience.”
Paul Morrison, UK Country Manager, Skava, adds: “Mobile is the fastest growing sector of e-commerce, yet our data shows that retailers have still to adapt to the changing landscape. M-commerce has increased 78% in the last year and the innovative retailers which have moved beyond their first-generation ‘static site scraped’ to a conversion-driven design are reaping the rewards.²”
To highlight the financial implications for retailer’s not optimising their websites for mobile, Skava developed the SkavaONE Calculator. By using a retailer’s average order value (AOV), traffic and conversion rates from all platforms, the SkavaONE Calculator rapidly informs retail executives on the serious long-term financial implications for retailers with under-performing mobile commerce experiences.
