With London Fashion Week drawing to a close over the weekend, Nosto, a personalisation platform for online retailers, has released research that shows that UK fashionistas are still relying on their desktops, instead of smartphones to buy clothes.

Nosto analysed data from over 700 online fashion merchants in Europe and found that the average order value (AOV) of clothing from UK fashion consumers was £116 on desktop for the first half of 2016. On mobile, the figure was significantly lower, at £89, even less than the average tablet spend of £107 among UK consumers.

There are some positive trends coming out of the research, however. The UK’s AOV of £89 for mobile fashion purchases (at £89) came third overall when compared against other countries in Europe, trailing d the Nordics (£101) and France (£96), yet ahead of Germany (£88) and Spain (£81). Additionally, mobile accounted for 29 per cent of all web traffic in the UK for fashion retailers in the first half of 2016, up from 22 per cent in H1 2015. Overall, UK retailers saw the biggest increase of traffic across all devices this year, reporting a 28 per cent rise, ahead of all other European countries, including Spain (up 25 per cent) and France (up 20 per cent).

Most encouragingly for Britains online clothing retailers, Nosto’s data also reveals that across all devices, UK fashion consumers were the second biggest spenders in Europe at £111 per purchase, only behind the Nordics (£123), yet well ahead of Spain (£95), Germany (£93) and France (£86).
“It’s clear that consumers in Europe love fashion, spending over £314bn on clothing items, both online and offline,” said Nosto co-founder and chief product officer, Juha Valvanne. “British consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable at looking for clothes through their smartphone. The next challenge to be tackled will be in converting these interested customers into paying ones and increasing their average order value.”

One way to do this, the company added is to fully optimise their site for smartphone users to make it easy for them to find the items they are looking for and deliver them inspiring, engaging shopping experiences.