Such “basic errors” could be remedied with “minimum investment”, according to the report. Poor performance in areas such as “thumb friendliness”, redirection from desktop to mobile versions and load speed are costing individual retailers as much as 12% in annual revenues, according to a report by website optimisation company QuBit.

Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit, said, “Losing that amount of money means that it’s something that they should put high up in their priorities.”

Currently, just 4.8% of retailers have websites optimised for the mobile web, despite the percentage of retail website traffic coming from mobile devices has tripling year on year to 15% in 2011.

The survey also found that tablets are a major driver of mobile commerce growth, generating 25% more page views than desktop users and, for those who go on to purchase, a 22% greater average order value.

However, the greater order value could be skewed because, at present, the majority of tablet owners are from wealthier demographics.

QuBit’s study also found that while visitors to retail websites from desktops are more likely to purchase (1% convert), tablet users are only marginally less likely to convert, at 0.87%.

Meanwhile, only 0.2% visitors to retail sites from smartphone devices actually convert.

QuBit’s study also assessed the performance of different verticals and found that the finance and travel sectors are the best performing when it comes to mobile performance (see table below).

Commenting on the research, Ian Carrington, Google’s head of mobile ad sales for EMEA, noted that 17% of UK businesses have mobile optimised sites across all verticals. “When one person [i.e. mass market retailer] gets it, then the others will get it, we’re not quite there yet,” he said, adding that people using their smartphones for price comparison while in-store will also soon be commonplace.

Also commenting on the research, David Rubin, chief operating officer of m-commerce company Mobank, said that a lot of retailers are wary of optimising their site for mobile because it requires slight modifications to their ecommerce sites.

“We speak to a lot of companies and they get worried about how this is going to affect their SEO [it won’t effect natural search rankings according to Google’s Carrington] but retailers have to think about their multichannel strategy now,” he said.