Retailers need to look at browsers

As people use browsers to shop online, retailers should concern themselves with exactly which browsers customers are using, a U.S. market research firm says. That's because the question of which browser they're using actually has a different answer depending on the time of day, research company Monetate said. During the day, when most people are at work, Internet Explorer still has the biggest share of the browsing activity at e-commerce sites, but the story is much different in the evening when Apple's Safari browser, in its desktop and mobile versions, tops both Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome browser, CNBC reported. Between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., Safari takes the dominant position with a 31.42 percent share of the market, Monetate found. Retailers need to make sure their sites look good in Safari browsers or they risk losing potential customers during the peak e-commerce shopping times, analysts said. Sites that aren't optimized for a browser can have problems ranging from text that doesn't line up to pictures that won't load and this can discourage for shoppers, Monetate head Kurt Heinemann said. "When someone is putting in a credit card number and their address, there has to be trust," Heinemann said. If consumers think the page is broken or poorly designed, they are likely to take their online shopping somewhere else, he said.