BANGALORE: Consumers in Asia-Pacific are vastly using their smartphones to browse and purchase from mcommerce sites, with 84percent of consumers using their smartphones to browse on a weekly basis, according to Rackspace’s new Asia-Pacific mcommerce study. However, frustrations are running high as 78percent of consumers experience technical issues when browsing sites on their smartphone, affecting purchasing decisions and company perception.  

The research commissioned by Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the managed cloud company, 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 (28percent) said they would not make purchases from an mcommerce site if they experience a technical issue and nearly all consumers (93percent) said their perception of a brand is affected if its website consistently has problems.

“Ecommerce companies need to realize the severity of poorly managed mcommerce 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, 61percent of consumers cited this as the number one problem (73percent in Hong Kong, 54percent in India and 58percent in Singapore). This was followed by scaling issues with 39percent of consumers on average saying that webpages do not look to scale on their smartphones (40percent in Hong Kong, 31percent in India and 46percent in Singapore). Page freezing and glitches ranked as the third most prevalent technical problem.

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