While mobile sales do not yet represent as high a proportion of a retailer's total sales as their main web sites, there is a wide customer satisfaction gap between mobile sites and traditional websites, according to the annual ForeSee Experience Index (FXI), which measures the customer experience across the UK's top ten mobile retail websites.
The research, carried out among nearly 2,500 consumers, investigated the impact that mobile shopping has had on retailers and on how UK shoppers are using their mobile phones to browse, research and purchase goods. "Our findings show that the top mobile sites are lagging behind their website counterparts," warned Eric Feinberg, senior director of mobile for ForeSee.
Earlier research by ForeSee found that every one-point increase in satisfaction translates into a 10.6% rise in a retailer's online revenues. This indicates a significant performance shortfall on the mobile front, and a significant opportunity that UK retailers can immediately address.
"It's important to remember that customers are using mobiles as a research medium too, to decide what products to buy from which retailers using which channels, so a less than satisfactory initial mobile experience also has the potential to drive buyers away from other channels like stores and call centres and into the arms of a competitor," said Feinberg.
The 2014 customer satisfaction scores for retailers' mobile sites were as follows:
Among the study's other main findings:
"With eMarketer predicting UK smartphone usage to hit 34.6 million (53.7% of the population) in 2014, and 37.8 million in 2015, you can see why an average or less-than-satisfactory customer experience should be a great and growing concern to UK's retailers," concluded Feinberg. "The simple truth is that if a retailer gets their mobile strategy anything other than right, the consumer will go to another retailer or to Amazon. While amazon.co.uk is not listed as one of Internet Retailer's top 10 mobile sites, we did investigate its own mobile site as an aside, and it scored 80 points - considerably ahead of any company featured in the UK top ten."
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