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Ways to improve mobile eCommerce experience
Online retailers are beginning to shift their strategies in order to capture more mobile shoppers. While desktop traffic has declined, mobile web traffic has increased by 47%.
While mobile traffic has increased, the current state of mobile commerce lags behind. Mobile eCommerce conversion rate is 12% — that's half of the desktop conversion rate. Despite the billions that retailers have invested in their online stores, the majority of them still face challenges in optimizing the mobile experience.
This means that your mobile eCommerce strategy must adapt and evolve- or fall behind. So what are the potential ways to improve the experience for mobile shoppers?
Optimize for speed
Who doesn’t hate it when they click on a link online, only to find that the page is taking forever to load? In our fast-paced society, we have grown accustomed to instant gratification and if an eCommerce site is not loading within 5 seconds or less, we tend to get impatient and leave.
Consumers today have exceptionally high standards for a mobile experience so you need to optimize your website for speed. Google reported that 54% percent of people say that as the load time for a brand’s mobile site increases, so does their frustration.
In fact, more than one in three consumers feel that slow load times would cause them to abandon a purchase altogether. So if you want to keep your customers happy and boost conversion rates, it’s important to streamline your website design on mobile and make sure it loads quickly.
What are some ways to do that?
- Resize images: Images make up most of the data transferred on the web. The bigger they are, the longer they take to load, and that can be frustrating to your users.
Check if your images are accurate to their display dimensions and if they aren’t, resize them. An image that’s 2000 x 2000 pixels will load slowly if displayed on a 300 x 300-pixel space. Make it smaller, and it will load faster.
- Compress images: You could reduce the file size of images without reducing their quality. This can shave off up to 80% of an image’s weight without losing its visual appeal. You could use a free tool like Tinypng or even Photoshop for this task. There are also services out there that automatically optimize images on your site, such as Cloudinary or Kraken.io.
- Use alternative formats: We know of PNG and JPEGs but WebP and SVG file formats are the most recent advancements in digital image delivery technology. There are several advantages to using SVG, such as the fact that they automatically resize to fit the screen size. These formats can reduce file sizes by over 25% without compromising quality, but they might not work on some browsers yet (e.g., Safari and Firefox).
If your website is slow, users will leave and never come back. Pages load slower on mobile than on desktop, and considering how impatient we are when surfing the web, your page must be able to load in under three seconds if you want to keep visitors interested.
Make the shopping experience as smooth and frictionless as possible
The entire experience should be simple and streamlined. The user should not have to work hard to find or purchase products.
**If you're not familiar with the term "friction," it basically means anything that impedes or slows down the process of achieving goals in an application or platform. In other words, there are many things that can lead to friction in a website, including poor design, connectivity issues, slow load times, and more.
First, you should remove all unnecessary steps in the shopping process. Less is more in this scenario and your goal should be to make the shopping process as easy as possible. This experience should be just as easy, if not easier, than making purchases on a desktop computer.
We recommend taking some time to analyze your current mobile funnel in Google Analytics or another analytics platform that you use, in order to identify any unnecessary steps in the shopping process, especially at checkout, that could be removed or consolidated.
Also, if you are currently not providing a mobile-friendly shopping experience, we highly recommend looking into responsive design. Responsive design is the practice of designing websites so that they look great on all devices and screen sizes, from large desktop monitors to small handheld phones.
Many eCommerce platforms like Shopify already support responsive design, so make sure you check if yours does too. You can also use responsive themes that will keep your website looking its best on any device.
Optimize your mobile SEO
Optimizing your site for mobile SEO is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. Your eCommerce site needs to be optimized for mobile search, but beyond just making sure that your site is mobile-friendly, you should also understand the difference between desktop and mobile search behavior. There are some keywords that perform much better on desktop, while others are more popular in the mobile space. To optimize for these differences in behavior, you can create separate landing pages and content for these specific keywords.
Keep all channels consistent.
Many companies are vying for an advantage in the fast-growing industry of mobile eCommerce. However, in order to do so, you must first guarantee that your customers are having a positive experience. The best way to do this is to make mobile channels consistent with the rest of your channels. Consistency across all platforms is crucial.
In the minds of customers, nothing is more frustrating than having to re-enter all of their saved items each time they go between a website on their desktop or laptop and a mobile device. In order to provide clients with a more consistent experience, it is essential for the user interfaces of various channels to be the same and to keep track of 'saved' items in the customer's carts.
Why is it so important to improve the mobile eCommerce experience?
You could lose to better ranking sites on Google.
Google's algorithm now ranks websites based on how well they work for people on their mobiles. Googlebot scans and indexes your web pages depending on how they display on mobile devices. So, if your mobile web pages aren't up to snuff, you won't be ranked very high. Your business could fall down the search engine rankings if you don't have a good mobile site. You could also lose out to competitors who pay more attention to their mobile offerings
It’s good for SEO and customer experience.
A superb mobile-responsive website not only boosts your SEO, but it also prioritizes the customer and attracts a larger audience. This is because a better-performing mobile site can improve the consumer experience and increase conversion rates.
According to Google, after a bad mobile experience, 62 percent of buyers are less inclined to buy from a business again. The display of a desktop site on a small mobile device, for example, might reflect adversely on a business, causing trust and credibility issues.
It supports omnichannel eCommerce.
The mobile eCommerce experience and omnichannel approach are important because retailers need to be able to keep up with their customers' evolving needs, and their customers' needs have evolved from being at the computer desktop only. Customers are now shopping on and in-between multiple devices and platforms, so retailers need to meet them where they are, which includes on their phones.
You can harness the power of social media.
Your customers are shopping on mobile devices and a part of them are looking for recommendations and reviews from social media apps like TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram. The power of social media is undeniable and you need to take advantage of it where you can.
Because of social media's influence. It's also vital to note the popularity and influence of social media and eCommerce when it comes to mobile experiences. 91% of social media users access social media platforms using a mobile device, with mobile phones accounting for 80% of time spent on social media. Many individuals use social media to look for product evaluations and suggestions, showing that this is a market you should engage with. Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook are examples of social media platforms that could be used as marketplaces for selling directly to customers.
CONCLUSION
Mobile commerce will be a huge part of the future in eCommerce, that’s for sure. The number of people shopping on mobile devices has increased rapidly in recent years and it shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, it has become such an important aspect of the purchasing process that businesses are starting to take notice.
Retailers should focus on a customer-centric approach to mobile commerce. The shopping experience needs to be fun, simple, and convenient for the customer, or they will lose business. In addition to a great shopping experience, retailers can take advantage of the fact that more than 65% of mobile internet traffic comes from smartphones, and most searches are done on smartphones.
Webinopoly has built cutting-edge mobile-responsive eCommerce websites on BigCommerce and Shopify for hundreds of businesses, big and small. Regardless of the platform you choose, Webinopoly will help with making any changes as seamless as possible by providing you with a professionally-made and optimized website that suits your needs both now and in the future.
If you’d like to learn more about what we can do or view our portfolio, please click on the links below:
Or contact us at 713-805-5888, email us at [email protected]. You can also leave us a message here. We can’t wait to have you onboard!