A recent survey of UK shoppers found that 70% will be put off spending their Christmas budget online this year by poorly designed websites and shopping experiences.
Seven out of ten - that's huge. But what it tells marketers is that if a website isn't performing well, both in terms of speed and quality, and if it isn't completely secure, online revenues will suffer.
Among the 1,000 British adults surveyed by PEER 1 Hosting, the features most likely to turn them away from a website were the requirement to set up an account to complete a purchase, complicated navigation, poor product offering and delivery times and slow, clunky design and loading.
If you're lucky, a consumer turned off by your website may seek another channel via which to shop with you (15%), however, more often than not, that potential customer will go to another, better performing, website (33%) or a different offline retailer (11%).
"With seasonal shifts like Christmas, as well as days like Mega Monday and Black Friday causing huge demand for retailers, it is vital that retailers are ready to meet the needs of shoppers. Retailers that get this wrong online are losing customers who go to rival shops both online and offline," says Dom Monkhouse, EMEA MD and SVP of customer experience at PEER 1 Hosting.
"This Christmas will see a rise in consumer spending, on multiple devices. It's paramount for brands to ensure that their ecommerce proposition is not driving shoppers into other retailer's stores."
Survey respondents were also asked to identify those brands who had lost their online business in the past. Those named included some top brands including Ikea, TopShop, B&Q and Homebase.
Earlier this year (August, 2013), a report from application solution provider Radware found the average time taken for a website to load has risen from 6.79 seconds in the Spring of 2012, to 7.72 seconds during a two week period from 24 June to 5 July 2013.
Consider those speeds against findings that over half (57%) of users abandon pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load.
"These findings are startling - retailers still don't realize that they are losing customers by neglecting core best practices," Tammy Everts, web performance evangelist, Radware, said of their report, 'State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed and Web Performance, Summer 2013'.
"Web pages need to work smarter and harder. Site owners not only need to adopt core best practices, but also utilize advanced techniques that optimize the browser's efficiency," added Everts.