Online shoppers are expected to spend €52bn across Europe in the lead up to the festive period, representing 20 per cent of the projected total EMEA online shopping spend during 2011 of €254bn, according to the IMRWorld European e-Christmas Sales Forecast.
New research from Brocade reveals that just over 86 per cent of consumers use their mobile device including smartphones or tablets to do their holiday shopping, and nearly 70 percent of these respondents are only prepared to wait a maximum of 20 seconds for a web page to load before going to another retailer.
This, says Brocade, suggests a strong shift in consumer expectations regarding service quality and changing habits in online shopping – making way for an mCommerce boom, and the need for service providers to step up to the plate and offer services to match, while coping with fluctuating seasonal demands.
“Mobile commerce is nothing new, but with the advent of the tablet and continuing sales for smartphones, 2012 will bring a seismic shift in consumer demand to shop anytime, anywhere, with no decline in service quality and download speeds, placing huge pressure on service provider networks to deliver,” says Brocade CMO, John McHugh.
The research found that 13 per cent of consumers will only wait a maximum of five seconds for a retailer’s web page to load before giving up, showing an increasing consumer trend towards demand for speed and uninterrupted service when shopping online. With the majority of people spending more time shopping online over the festive period (19 per cent spending twice as much time as usual) and the growing trend for shopping on the go, retailers are facing increasing pressure to ensure that their networks stand up to heavily fluctuating seasonal demands. 
“While consumers are put off by slow connection speeds, our research indicates that growth of online shopping is very much dependent on the ability of retailers to provide quality services,” says McHugh. “According to Gartner, there were 17m million Tablet computers shipped in 2010, a figure set to hit 326m in 2015. That alone should be sounding alarm bells for retailers. With over a third of people claiming to already own a Tablet computer, and a further 22 per cent intending to bring one into the home or give one as a gift at Christmas, the trade-off between providing a consistent service throughout the year and being able to handle the extra capacity and bandwidth required during the biggest shopping months of the year, is a huge challenge for retailers.”
The research also found that of those respondents who will be buying a smartphone or Tablet computer in time for Christmas, or as a gift for a member of the family or friend, 38 percent will be used for work purposes; three quarters of respondents already own a smartphone, while almost 37 per cent already own a Tablet.
Brocade offers a suite of high-performance, scalable, cloud-optimised networking solutions, designed to enable businesses to meet the demands of the modern consumer.
