76% of UK SMEs have no mobile website but 89% want one

Most retailers appreciate that mobile commerce is important to growth, but few have got their act together and developed one. That's according to OnePoll's survey of 300 higher managerial professionals from UK SME retailers.

Over three-quarters (76%) of SME retailers in the UK do not have a mobile commerce website despite 89% knowing that it was necessary for the continued growth of their business.

Furthermore, these professionals should have known better from their own experiences with mobile commerce. Of the 300 participants, 8 out of 10 said they had found shopping on their mobile on non-optimized sites was slow and difficult to navigate. In fact, 27% had abandoned mobile transactions for those very reasons.

"The retailers that we spoke to are right in thinking that mobile commerce is essential for their growth," said Dominic Keen, chief executive of MoPowered, a mobile commerce solution aimed at the smaller retail sector. "Research from Google shows that 15% of all online traffic is now coming through mobile. This means that not having a mobile optimized site is equivalent to shutting your online store for one day every week."

The main barriers to mcommerce were perceived as high costs, lack of resources and concerns about security, found the poll.

Recent research from eDigitalResearch and PortalTech found that, in the two years to June 2012, the number of people using their smartphone to shop online in the UK has quadrupled. Today, 64% of British smartphone owners use their device to shop. Shopping through the mobile web has remained more popular than via mobile apps.

Furthermore, a whopping 84% of smartphone owners have used their device to browse websites with a third doing so on a daily basis. Over three-quarters (77%) use their smartphone to research products.

Tags: mcommerce, mobile marketing, retail, small business, smartphone, SME, UK