Long queues costing retailers £12bn a year

Long queues are the biggest turn-off for UK shoppers, whose abandoned baskets are costing retailers up to £12 billion each year.

This is according to new research from Adyen, which suggests that British retailers are struggling to keep up with the increasing demand for improved customer experience in-store. The payments platform commissioned 451 Research to survey 1,000 UK consumers and 100 senior retail decision makers during the second quarter of this year.

Around £6.4 billion has been lost by retailers to their competitors over the past 12 months due to long queues, according to the study, while £5.6 billion has been lost as customers spend less or leave a shop altogether due to long queues. A further £422 million has been lost as a result of retailers not offering customers’ preferred payment methods.

The study also revealed that a third of UK consumers prefer to shop online for almost everything. Of those, 38 per cent cited waiting in queues as the primary reason they do not like shopping in-store. Over three quarters of respondents said anything longer than five minutes is too long to queue.

“Technology is constantly pushing the boundaries of how we shop, and customer expectations are changing fast,” said Myles Dawson, UK managing director at Adyen. “Successful retailers are adapting to meet these new demands, while those failing to evolve are suffering – as headlines show us.

“The real battleground is customer experience, and our survey shows that there are huge opportunities for retailers to differentiate themselves by addressing simple pain-points like queuing.”

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