73 per cent of large businesses have now optimised their websites for mobile, according to Sage Pay’s third annual E-Business Benchmark Report. Last year, just 5 per cent of businesses surveyed had an app. Today, 22 per cent of the 1,500 companies asked said they have developed one. Of those still without an app, 48 per cent are planning to build one in the next year.

Mobile optimise for £500

Mobile is one of the five key areas that both large and small businesses should be working on, said Sage Pay’s CEO, Simon Black, at the launch of the report. He said that 82 per cent of businesses manage to optimise their website for less than £1000, while 59 per cent spend this or less on building an app. The most common amount spent on developing an app is between £500 and £1000, identified by 44 per cent of respondents. 48 per cent spent the same on mobile optimisation for their site.

Today, 25 per cent of online businesses see 10-19 per cent of sales coming from their mobile app, with 13 per cent seeing 20-39 per cent of sales from this channel. 16 per cent of companies see 20-39 per cent of sales through their mobile site, with 22 per cent seeing 10-19 per cent from here. “You cannot ignore mobile – wherever you are – if you are selling,” Black said.

Death to PPC

The secure payment services CEO declared ‘death to PPC’ for small businesses, saying that as they cannot compete on budgets with larger retailers, they should work on other areas like social media. He also highlighted the value of testing all of the elements of your customer journey – mobile usability, checkout functionality, returns policy – as increasing conversions by just 1 per cent is the equivalent of increasing traffic by 16 per cent.

Fines for security breaches

Sage Pay enables 40,000 eCommerce businesses to accept payments, facilitating 250m transactions every year. Black warned businesses about the temptation to take out some of the security steps in order to reduce the length of the journey to payment on mobile, highlighting huge fines incurred by online sellers in the US for doing this.

68 per cent of large online businesses have lost out to fraud in the last 12 months, less surprising, as 18 per cent admitted to being non-compliant with industry-standards on security, compared to just 5 per cent of small organisations.