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Tips to Optimize your eCommerce Business for Mobile
Mobile sales optimization for your business
We use smartphones for everything from controlling the temperature in our homes, to shopping for groceries, clothing and even a new house or car! Non-optimized sites are quickly abandoned by mobile users when they see text is cut off, buttons or menus are hidden or unavailable, or they aren’t able to clearly see your product pictures and graphics. Screens are getting larger, to make interaction with our devices easier, and 51% of internet users are using those screens for shopping. Optimizing your site for mobile use is the only way to take advantage of this growing trend.
What does it actually mean to have your ecommerce website optimized?
How mobile-friendly is your site? There are varying degrees of mobile-friendly, and sometimes it’s difficult to gauge just how successful your mobile efforts have been. Many businesses are taking advantage of online tools to assess mobile-friendliness, considering image and video load times, text visibility, page loading speed, clickability and the use of pop-ups to determine how great (or how much work) your site really is for customers. Let’s explore a few strategies forward-thinking businesses are using to optimize their eCommerce business for mobile.
Strategies to optimize your business for mobile:
1. Responsive, eye-catching website design
You have just moments to capture the attention or interest of your customer, and must create an eye-catching design to draw them in. Your site should be interesting, use the right colors, and should be easy to use and responsive, to catch the attention of browsing customers. Consider deploying AI-enabled chat technology to greet each customer and answer frequently asked questions about your product. Or use customer photos and reviews to capture customer attention, as they see how your product or service is being used by other customers.
2. User-friendly navigation
Remember, mobile is a bit different than traditional websites, as we are navigating using finger-tips instead of using a mouse. Make sure that your site is easy to navigate for everyone, and as simple as possible to use. Menus and the home button should be placed in intuitive spots, and easy to find on every screen, of every size. Shopping carts and past orders should also be easy to find on every screen, to avoid customers being forced to abandon their shopping carts because they can’t find the page!
If your customers trend toward an older market, using complex maps, search functions and flashy video advertisements might be too much for your customer base. If your customers are typically a younger crowd, consider gamifying your site, or adding fun immersive features and functions, to allow customers to see your product in their homes and in their lives.
3. Fast website load times
The longer your site takes to load, the less likely customers are to wait for it. It’s important to design your site to load as quickly as possible, by cleaning up videos, graphics and elements that typically take a longer-than-normal load time. Group videos and bandwidth-consuming graphic elements on clearly marked pages, or confine them to your social media platforms, where videos are automatically compressed and optimized for quick online viewing. Your main landing page should be as clean and easy to read and load as possible, to avoid losing impatient customers who know a faster-loading site is a click away.
4. Intuitive checkout process
The checkout process should be the fastest element of your site, and the easiest to use. Customers hate surprises at this stage, so it's important they have all the information about cost, shipping and delivery on a single screen. Use sites like the USPS shipping calculator, to show customers how much their shipping will cost, and how fast their package will be delivered to their door.
Sites that aren’t optimized for mobile often experience issues in this area, as vital parts of the check-out process, like the sections for payment or address, are cut off by the edges of the screen. Imagine the frustration of a customer who can’t find the “Pay Now” button after giving you all their financial information – and avoid it by updating your checkout process.
Takeaways
Smartphones get faster and more intuitive every day, and with these advances come better ways to use them to enhance the shopping experience. Mobile is the future of eCommerce, and it’s important to make your site as mobile-friendly as possible to avoid missing out on half of the world's business!
Meet The Author:
Nick Andrew Rojas is a business consultant turned journalist who loves working with small and medium-sized companies. He has contributed to many publications such as Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, and Yahoo. In his spare time, he hangs out at the beach with his dog Presto.
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