Getting Started With A Mobile Optimized Shop

Mobile eCommerce (mCommerce) is growing.

It also looks like it’s here to stay.

A significant portion of eCommerce sales is now coming from mobile devices. An overwhelming 74% of traffic to all Shopify stores is on mobile.

eMarketer reports global mCommerce sales rose by 40.3% in 2017 to a whopping $1.357 trillion. That’s 6% of total spend in retail. Furthermore, 62% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile devices in the last 6 months.

But you don’t need to look at the numbers. Ask yourself: when was the last time you browsed, researched, or bought something from your phone?

The lesson is clear. If you want to succeed with your eCommerce business in today’s technological landscape, catering to your mobile audience is mandatory, not a nice-to-have. Your mobile site also influences how well you perform on Google.

**Furthermore, there is a gap between customers’ expectations on mobile and what is provided today. **

• 40% of users will go to competitor shops after a bad mobile experience, yet 84% of them find it hard to complete a mobile transaction.

• Think With Google’s research found that while more than half of overall web traffic comes from mobile, mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop.

How can you ensure your shop is optimized for the digital-first, mobile-toting, omnichannel customer?

Well, get started by ensuring your shop is mobile-optimized with these 5 steps.

Step 1. Ensure your site is using a mobile-responsive design

This is the foundation of all your mobile eCommerce efforts.

Most themes on site builders like WordPress and Squarespace are built with mobile responsiveness in mind. Modern eCommerce platforms like Shopify allow you to create optimized stores with little technical knowledge. So that’s easy, right? But there is more.

Step 2. Evaluate your current customer experience of your eCommerce site on mobile and desktop:

After assessing your site’s mobile design, evaluate how it performs on mobile devices. Don’t forget to think across different platforms or device types.

Think of these use cases when testing your site’s user experience.

• Buying a single product and going straight to checkout

• Buying multiple products

• Buying multiple products, leaving the site, and coming back again

• Test the contact us page if your form is working properly

• Display and rendering of product images and product descriptions

• The appearance of your navigation bar and sidebar, does it cover any critical site components?

• Do product filters filter items correctly?

Step 3. Evaluate your site speed on mobile

People are notoriously impatient on mobile devices. They want to quickly get information, finish the checkout process or view a product immediately when they click through.

Data from Think With Google shows that 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Therefore, mobile speed equals more customers.

At the checkout stage, speed is even more crucial. Keep page load speeds to under 3 seconds or 57% of your site’s visitors will abandon their carts.

Clearly, mobile speed and page size matter to your business’s bottom line. So what can you do?

One area that heavily influences your page load speed is your website's images. It is also your easiest page speed optimization win.

Make sure images are optimized for size and web display. Use an image compression tool like Compressor. io to reduce image sizes on your website. Alternatively, look at your image dimensions and format to reduce the sizes of your images.

You can also use Google PageSpeed Insights to review your page speed.

Step 4. Avoid auto-rotating homepage carousels on mobile

Auto-rotating homepage carousels, sideshows, and carousels may look pretty but are bad news for mobile sites.

They slow down your site and confuse your site visitors. An article by thegood on image carousels suggests that the paradox of choices affects your users’ user experience and resulting in them not buying anything from your site at all.

A simpler and more efficient method is to display important slide content as static content on the homepage.

Step 5. Ensure your checkout process is mobile-friendly

You need to make your checkout process simple and fast while a person is on their mobile device.

Remember on mobile devices, typing tends to be slower compared to desktops. A person’s fingers are clumsier on a smartphone than on a desktop keyboard.

You’ll also want to keep text input on your mobile checkout page to a minimum. Remember on mobile devices, an on-screen keyboard will pop up whenever a person needs to fill in a form. This reduces the viewable screen area and makes forms harder to fill in.

You’ll also want to break down your checkout process into multiple steps. By breaking down a complex form, your users will be less intimidated. For example, Topman uses a progress indicator to guide the shopper along the checkout process.

Source: Crazy Egg

You can also use an accordion on your mobile site to save space and indicate progress in the checkout process.

Conclusion

By now, you know mobile optimization is essential for growing your eCommerce store.

It’s not enough to have a mobile-optimized website. You need to think about the user experience with mobile devices. You also need to understand how users interact with their mobile devices and design your mobile eCommerce sites accordingly.

Get started with optimizing your mobile site’s page load speed as a first step. Remember to approach this process from the view of your customers.

Think about this: what if my customer wanted to do this in my shop, how seamless would it be? Would I enjoy shopping in my own shop?

Once you have these questions in mind, you can sit down and evaluate where to improve your mobile customer experience.  

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