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Technical difficulties put off m-commerce consumers [China Daily: Hong Kong Edition](China Daily: Hong Kong Edition Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) A recent survey found that 78 percent of consumers experienced technical problems when browsing websites on their smartphones, causing over a quarter of them not to buy because of the surfing difficulties. The research commissioned by Rackspace, surveyed 1,200 consumers aged between 22 to 44 years old across Hong Kong, Singapore and India, and found out that 84 percent of the respondents used their smartphones to browse shopping sites on a weekly basis. Specifically, Hong Kong consumers make purchases mostly via their mobile phones on a monthly basis. E-commerce companies, which wish to boost business through synchronizing mobile commerce (m-commerce) - purchases made from websites from mobile devices - may have to seriously consider improving their user experience, the research showed. However, 28 percent of consumers said they would not make purchases from an m-commerce site if they experience a technical issue. Nearly all consumers said their perception of a brand is affected if its website consistently has problems. Slow page loading was ranked as the most prevalent issue, and was the top challenge faced by consumers in Hong Kong. Ajit Melarkode, managing director of Rackspace Asia Pacific, considered that it might have something to do with how e-commerce companies design their websites. "All the statistics are telling me there're some fundamental issues with the way e-commerce sites in Hong Kong are optimizing their mobile usage. According to my knowledge, a lot of e-commerce sites focus more on the speed of transaction and the website design, instead of the right IT infrastructure support," said Melarkode. Other technical problems include scaling issues with 39 percent of consumers on average saying that web pages do not look to scale on their smartphones, while page freezing and glitches ranked as the third most prevalent technical problem. The survey also found out that Hong Kong consumers mostly would wait six to 10 seconds for a webpage to appear, with more than one-fifth of them closing the sites and move on after the wait. "M-commerce is not an option anymore, it's a must-do," said Florian Legendre, Bluecom managing director. "As m-commerce is growing much faster in Asia than e-commerce, companies must put their mobile strategy as a priority on the business agenda. " [email protected] (HK Edition 09/24/2014 page8) (c) 2014 China Daily Information Company. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info). |