Bangalore: Consumers in Asia-Pacific are vastly using their smartphones to browse and purchase from e-commerce sites, with 84% of consumers using their smartphones to browse on a weekly basis, according to a survey done by Rackspace Asia Pacific.
However, frustrations are running high as 78% of consumers experience technical issues when browsing sites on their smartphone, affecting purchasing decisions and company perception.Â
Rackspace, a managed cloud company surveyed 1200 consumers aged between 22 and 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 an e-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 e-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,†he added.
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.