Tribe research: Poor website performance costing retailers dear

Poorly optimised websites and inferior online experiences could cost UK retailers £10.6 billion in lost revenues in 2019, according to a new report from Tribe.

The company surveyed 2,000 UK consumers and found that on average they abandon 10% of their total online shopping spend (£106.46 billion UK e-commerce sales in 2019) due to poor website performance. With 83% of consumers saying this would make them shop elsewhere, the biggest pain-point was slow loading webpages for 37%. This was followed by experiencing pages errors, such as receiving an Error 404 notification, and broken links for 35% and 28%, respectively.

79% of UK shoppers felt retailers could do more to make their websites easier to shop, with fast loading webpages (54%), smoother online checkout processes (52%) and better site navigation (48%) among the top improvements.

“In the era of digitally transformed retail, the highly-predictable calendar of predefined trading peaks of yesteryear looks increasingly antiquated. The very heartbeat of retail is now driven by customer demand, facilitated by real-time data analytics, low-latency digital networks and algorithm-driven micro-trends that can sweep a social network in nanoseconds,” says Deri Jones, CEO at Tribe.

“The first challenge when preparing your website for the new era of perma-peak is to adopt a regime of always-on testing. Trading peaks can happen at any time, so websites need to be in a state of permanent readiness to ensure customer experience is upheld, customer loyalty remains uncompromised, and sales opportunities aren’t lost.”

Download the company’s full report here.