PARIS/LONDON: Technical issues such as slow-loading web pages and undelivered emails are costing European retailers billions in lost business according to new reports.
In the UK, e-commerce specialists Summit looked at 230 leading retailers' websites and found that 92% were not meeting the industry's three-second benchmark. Some pages took as many as eight seconds or more to load.
On average, the study found that home pages took 4.11 seconds load, search functions took 4.08 seconds, category pages took 4.25 seconds and product pages took 5.20 seconds.
As a result, Summit estimated that UK online retailers were missing out on up to £8.5bn of sales as impatient consumers abandoned potential purchases.
"There is significant revenue to be recovered by making your sites work faster," Summit CEO Hedley Aylott told The Drum. "In some cases this amount could be enough to open a brand new store," he added.
Across the industries considered, the travel sector emerged with most credit but even there just 20% of sites met the three-second mark.
In France, meanwhile, anti-spam filters are costing the French economy €1.7bn annually in lost business by misdirecting legitimate emails, the Journal du Net reported.
Mailjet, a specialist in email deliverability, noted that between 15% and 20% of legitimate emails failed to reach the inboxes of the intended recipients and calculated the subsequent financial impact.
The value of the emails was dependent, said Mailjet, on their nature. Marketing emails accounted for some 14% of non-delivered mail, while notifications or alerts took up another 9%, and transactional emails, such as invoices or confirmations, amounted to 7%.
Within France alone, that amounted to €4.5m of lost business daily, or €1.7bn annually, claimed Mailjet. Scaling it up to a global level indicated that €106bn was disappearing unnecessarily.
In the UK, e-commerce specialists Summit looked at 230 leading retailers' websites and found that 92% were not meeting the industry's three-second benchmark. Some pages took as many as eight seconds or more to load.
On average, the study found that home pages took 4.11 seconds load, search functions took 4.08 seconds, category pages took 4.25 seconds and product pages took 5.20 seconds.
As a result, Summit estimated that UK online retailers were missing out on up to £8.5bn of sales as impatient consumers abandoned potential purchases.
"There is significant revenue to be recovered by making your sites work faster," Summit CEO Hedley Aylott told The Drum. "In some cases this amount could be enough to open a brand new store," he added.
Across the industries considered, the travel sector emerged with most credit but even there just 20% of sites met the three-second mark.
In France, meanwhile, anti-spam filters are costing the French economy €1.7bn annually in lost business by misdirecting legitimate emails, the Journal du Net reported.
Mailjet, a specialist in email deliverability, noted that between 15% and 20% of legitimate emails failed to reach the inboxes of the intended recipients and calculated the subsequent financial impact.
The value of the emails was dependent, said Mailjet, on their nature. Marketing emails accounted for some 14% of non-delivered mail, while notifications or alerts took up another 9%, and transactional emails, such as invoices or confirmations, amounted to 7%.
Within France alone, that amounted to €4.5m of lost business daily, or €1.7bn annually, claimed Mailjet. Scaling it up to a global level indicated that €106bn was disappearing unnecessarily.
Data sourced from The Drum, Journal du Net; additional content by Warc staff
