32 per cent of companies have no social or mobile commerce solutions currently in place, according to a survey from CloudSense. More encouragingly, though, only 13 per cent of respondents said that they had no plans to implement social or mobile commerce in the future – meaning that theres a big opportunity for mCommerce solution providers to help the remaining 20 per cent get optimised.

“Our findings show that many businesses are already missing out on revenue because they do not have mobile and social commerce solutions in place and without action, the gap between them and their competitors is only going to grow,” says CloudSense managing director Richard Britton. “There is a perception in some businesses that these technologies are not yet mature, but the hard reality is that their competitors are already making profit from these channels. The barrier for many firms is that they still don’t have the right technology in place, so a multichannel sales approach remains a challenge rather than an opportunity – but these firms need to catch up very quickly if they don’t want to be left behind by their competitors.”

As for the the biggest advantages of a multichannel approach, respondents commonly pointed to an improved customer experience (40 per cent), increasing total sales (31 per cent) and having a single view of the customer (29 per cent).