Consumers in Asia-Pacific are vastly using their smartphones to purchase from M-commerce sites, with 84% of consumers using their smartphones to browse on a weekly basis, according to Rackspace’s new Asia-Pacific M-commerce study conducted in Hong Kong, Singapore and India. However, 78% of consumers experience technical issues when browsing sites on their smartphone, affecting purchasing decisions and company perception.
The research, surveyed 1200 consumers aged between 22-44 across Hong Kong, Singapore and India to gain insights into mobile habits and behaviors. Across markets, over a quarter of consumers (28%) said they would not make purchases from M-commerce site if they experience a technical issue and nearly all consumers (93%) said their perception of a brand is affected if its website consistently has problems.
“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,” said Ajit Melarkode, Managing director of Rackspace Asia Pacific. “A five second delay in page loading can be the difference in a sale or not.”
Among server-related technical problems that consumers’ experience, slow page loading ranked as the most prevalent issue across Asia Pacific. On average, 61% of consumers cited this as the number one problem (73% in Hong Kong, 54% in India and 58% in Singapore). This was followed by scaling issues with 39% of consumers on average saying that webpages do not look to scale on their smartphones (40% in Hong Kong, 31% in India and 46% in Singapore). Page freezing and glitches ranked as the third most prevalent technical problem.
“To retain customers on your M-commerce site, performance and support are key. Companies need to build a premium mobile experience for their customers that is built on speed, security and reliability while simultaneously fixing any IT issues that arise in real-time,” said Adam McCarthy, Director and General Manager of Rackspace Asia. “To do this, companies should look into partnering with an IT hosting partner that can manage, scale and support their site at all times, allowing online retailers to focus on their customers, sales strategy and long-term growth without worry.”