Nearly a Year Later, Small Sellers Still Stumble over Mobile

While more and more consumers are using mobile devices to access e-commerce sites, few small merchants have made their sites easy to navigate and buy from, according to research released this week.

Indeed, mobile optimization—making sure a site loads quickly and renders checkout forms that are easy to read and fill out—remains a relative rarity among Level 4 e-commerce and multichannel retailers, according to ControlScan Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based security-technology vendor that conducted the research with Hauppage, N.Y.-based merchant processor TransFirst. Level 4 merchants process up to 20,000 e-commerce transactions or as many as 1 million face-to-face payments each year.

Among both types of merchant, some 49% say they haven’t optimized their sites for mobile, while a further 17% don’t know or are unsure. This comes at a time when more consumers than ever are armed with mobile devices. For the first time, more than half of U.S. consumers, 55%, have a smart phone, while just over a third own a tablet, according to the Pew Research Center.

These increases in mobile usage are showing up in the results small sellers are seeing. Among those that track mobile sales, some 16% say more than 25% of their of their business is now coming from a mobile device, compared to 7% in a similar survey the two companies conducted last summer.

As it turns out, though, such tracking is the exception rather than the rule. Fully 70% of the small-merchant respondents said they don’t track mobile transactions as distinct from PC-based payments, and another 12% don’t know or are unsure whether they do. Yet, when asked why they haven’t optimized their sites, the majority, some 57%, cite the absence of a “compelling” reason to do so.

This result confounds the researchers. “I find this silly because in a card-not-present environment, they’re not talking to the customer,” says Craig Tieken, director of product at TransFirst. Nonetheless, a customer who wearies of pinching and tapping on a little screen is likely to go to a competitor’s site. “Once that visitor is gone, they’re probably gone for good,” says Tieken.

There has been some progress since last year’s survey, say both Tieken and David Abouchar, senior director of product managent at ControlScan. The fraction of merchants that haven’t optimized for mobile has declined from 2012’s 55% level, for example, while those e-commerce-only merchants that track mobile distinctly from PCs has grown from 16% to 28%. Still, multichannel merchants have regressed on this question, sliding from 20% to 14%.

“We’re seeing the right movement, but I’m not sure we’re seeing enough movement,” says Tieken.

As they did last year, both men point to independent sales organizations and other acquirers as critical agents in getting small e-commerce merchants to optimize their sites for the rapidly growing hordes of mobile shoppers. “They’re the front line,” says Tieken.

Abouchar advises ISOs to show small-merchant executives what their sites look like side-by-side with an optimized site. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” he says. “It’ll become very clear how challenging it is to work with a non-optimized site.”

In other results from the research, Square Inc. emerges as the clear winner among providers of mobile-acceptance apps and gear, with 60% of merchants saying they had adopted the company’s product. A distant second is PayPal Here, with 19%. These results are qualified, however, by the fact that only 17% of respondents with face-to-face sales have adopted any mobile-acceptance product.

As for mobile wallets, the news is bleak among these small sellers, with just 3% saying they accept payments via near-field communication or by barcode scanning.

All told, the companies received 1,652 responses to their survey questionnaire over the 30 days from March 18 to April 18.