With London Fashion Week in full swing new research released today finds that the UK’s fashionistas aren’t as ‘with it’ as they might thing they are: they are still relying on their desktops, instead of smartphones to buy clothes, despite mobile eCommerce as a whole accounting for 51% of online purchases in the UK.
Nosto, a personalisation platform for online retailers, analysed data from more than 700 small to large merchants in Europe and found that British consumers spend less on mobile for fashion, but more than most Europeans. Well, that’s something I suppose.
It also discovered that the average order value (AOV) of clothing from UK fashion consumers was £116 on desktop for the first half of 2016 per purchase, while the average mobile purchase for fashion items was much lower, at £89, even less than the average tablet spend of £107 amongst UK consumers.
However, online fashion retailers in the UK can point to some very positive trends emerging amongst consumers in regards to mobile.
The UK’s AOV for mobile fashion purchases at £89 came third overall when compared against other countries in Europe, only behind the Nordics (£101) and France (£96), yet ahead of Germany (£88) and Spain (£81). And we wear nicer trousers. Fact.
Meanwhile mobile accounts for nearly a third (29%) of all web traffic in the UK for fashion retailers in the first half of 2016, up from 22% in H1 of 2015.
Overall, UK retailers saw the biggest increase of traffic across all devices this year, reporting a 28% rise, ahead of all other European countries, including Spain (25% rise) and France (20%).
Most encouragingly of all for Britain’s online clothing retailers, Nosto’s data also discovered across all devices, UK fashion consumers were the second biggest spenders in Europe at £111 per purchase, only behind the Nordics (£123), yet well ahead of Spain (£95), Germany (£93) and France (£86).
Juha Valvanne, Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Founder at Nosto explains the findings: “It’s clear that consumers in Europe love fashion, spending over £314 billion on clothing items, both online and offline. British consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable at looking for clothes through their smartphone, the next challenge to be tackled will be in converting these interested customers, into paying ones and increasing their average order value.”
Matti Rönkkö, CEO of Nosto adds: “UK online fashion retailers can make some simple changes to their mobile sites to really build further trust with their customers. With Google’s new mobile-friendly rules implemented last year, a retailer’s website must now be fully optimised for smartphone users. Fashion fans typically have less patience than other shoppers: mobile bounce rate is the highest of any device and time on site is also the lowest, so retailers really need to make it easy for them to find the items they are looking for – speak to their customers as individuals and delivering them inspiring, engaging shopping experiences.”
