A new study from Conversity has looked at the troubles which e-commerce sites face when it comes to turning casual visitors into paying customers, concluding that it makes sense for businesses which offer safe shopping online to follow in the footsteps of their bricks-and-mortar counterparts to tackle this.

At the moment just four per cent of people who head to shopping sites online will end up going through with a transaction. In comparison with the 22.5 per cent conversion rate that high street stores enjoy on average, this is clearly far less impressive.

Indeed, department stores perform even more compellingly than any other outlet, with half of all visitors walking away with a product in their possession. Meanwhile, with all of the window shopping that goes on in the e-commerce ecosystem, it is arguably unsurprising that fewer people commit to purchases on their first visit.

Report spokesperson Laura Arthurton said that one of the reasons that the high street was better at converting consumers than the web was that in-store assistants could help tailor the experience to individual shoppers. This means it makes sense for e-commerce operators to offer improved personalisation and in-depth customer support on their sites if they want to improve conversion rates.

She also argued that one of the issues which caused people to browse elsewhere rather than buying immediately was a lack of consistency across different platforms. Namely, the desktop sites of major retailers will achieve a greater proportion of conversions than their mobile-friendly counterparts, indicating a discrepancy in the quality of the experience between the two.

With less room to let sites breathe, it is certainly a challenge to design an impactful mobile storefront, but this seems like a necessity in an age of increased smartphone use.