45% Of British Consumers Prefer High-Street Shopping To Online

A recent poll by Rackspace, which questioned 2,000 British consumers, found that almost half of them prefer to shop on the high street as opposed to online due to a number of problems they often encounter when online shopping, Warc reports.

It was found that over one third of consumers give up searching for a product on a specific website after ten minutes if they cannot find it, and over a quarter would give up searching after 15 minutes. Another 45% said they would switch websites, whilst 35% were willing to abandon their shopping cart entirely, and 24% said they would prefer to just go to the physical store and find what they wanted there.

When it comes to the specific problems consumers are faced with when shopping online, these include pop-up ads, too many choices that take a long time to filter through, search tools that can make it difficult to find specific items and a poor, impersonal service compared to in-store. In fact, 26% felt that the categories offered do not match their desired criteria, 25% find them unspecific and 20% often find they are faced with only one option.

Nigel Beighton, the vice president of technology at Rackspace, stated: “There is no doubt that the internet has made shopping cheaper, but this survey shows that retailers are really missing a trick when it comes to converting browsing shoppers to buying customers on their websites.”

A separate survey by Nominet also found that 35% of UK consumers expect local businesses to have an online presence; however only 6% believe such businesses have the right training and understanding to do this properly. Some 21% expect to be able to contact a local business online and 17% would visit a competitors site if a business did not have an online presence.