10 Top Tips to Improve your Mobile Ecommerce Website

Mobile commerce has been increasing at a rapid rate and 2016 is the year when most experts expect mobile revenue to overtake desktop.

After several ‘Years of the Mobile’, and a somewhat anti-climatic Mobilegeddon, it should be pretty clear that if you don’t have a mobile solution in place, you’re late for the party and mobile should become your main priority pretty sharpish.

If you don’t have a mobile solution then you’re in luck! I’ve put together 10 tips that can help you start planning how you are going to address the increase in mobile shoppers that are heading your way.

There are several options when it comes to being mobile-friendly: responsive and mobile-specific sites being two of them. There are pro’s and con’s for mobile vs responsive sites however responsive seems to be the more popular choice, mainly for their easier maintenance and friendlier for SEO.

Even if you’ve been well prepared and are armed with a responsive/mobile website then it still doesn’t do any harm to check it over and ensure it is all working as expected; in fact I would consider this good practice!

These our our top ten tips for a good mobile shopping experience:

1. Fast loading pages

Speed is key, if your web page takes too long to load, your customer is gone, why should they have to wait?

70% of users expect the site to load in less than 2 seconds so ensure your mobile site is optimized including compressed images, you can test your site here and get recommendations from Google.

Source: Compuware

2. Rich shopping experience

If the information is available on the desktop version then it should be easily accessible on any device; websites with mobile versions will often offer a diluted version prompting users to ‘view desktop version’ and suffer from a poor user experience.

Mobile traffic officially overtook desktop in 2015, and with that the number of mobile-only internet users. If your information is accessible only your desktop site and not on your mobile, then you’re potentially losing out on 11% of the digital population.

You should ensure that all content is in place to sell your brand is easily accessible from all devices. This is also a good time to review your content. If it’s not good enough to be viewed on all devices – is it worth having in the first place?

3. Seamless Checkout Process

If you’re shopping on a mobile, you don’t want to have to go through multiple pages to checkout; minimal fields and a clear login option to their account are a must-have.

It’s the little things that count too – such as a progress bar, trustmarks, field-sensitive keyboards and so on. These are all things that can prevent a customer from getting frustrated and abandoning their cart.

Amazon is a great example of a good mobile checkout process and worth taking a look to see what you can learn and implement onto your own website.

4. Security

You should ensure that all aspects of your website are secure and display the appropriate badges where appropriate i.e. SSL certificate.

Not only will this improve customer confidence, it may also benefit you on the search results page. Google recently announced that they’re now favoring https sites over their http counterparts in a bid to make the web more secure.

5. Clear Navigation

Your menu should be easily accessible and suitable for touch. Burger stack menu is now very common and your customers will be familiar with the icon as the symbol for menu.

All support and informational pages should be available as required and have a mobile friendly design to ensure users do not have to use the desktop version to find the information they require.

6. Easy to use

Simple, clean designs are the way forward and all buttons/links should be designed for touch, there is nothing worse than having to zoom in on the page in order to click the desired link.

It is worth remembering that some desktop features can interfere with the mobile browsing experience and any change you make to your website should be checked on all devices to ensure no browsing experience is hindered.

7. Easy Payment Process

Having to type your payment information can be time consuming and often frustrating, there are a number of ways to address this:

Introducing PayPal as a secondary payment option. This is great for mobile users as they can simply login into their PayPal account and pay without having to enter any billing information.  I often hear ‘PayPal is expensive’ and therefore it is not used, but my argument to that is; it is more expensive to drive traffic to your website and not convert!

My next tip is slightly more complicated, depending on your payment provider, however being able to give the customer the option to save their payment information so they can checkout with very little field input.  When implementing this option you should always ensure PCI compliance.

(From the customer’s POV, both are great options if you are sat on the couch and your wallet is in the other room…)

8. Social Login

Allowing customers to use their social profiles to login or create their account is a great way to prevent shopping cart disruption.

Again think of it from that customer POV, how much easier is it to sign in using a network you frequently use, without having to remember multiple logins/passwords?

9. Amazing Images

Images are the key selling point of your product – without the image – how will they know what it looks like? These images should be large enough so the customer can view the product easily and without squinting!  You should always take care to ensure your images are optimized for mobile and don’t increase page loading times.

10. Clear calls to actions

Calls to action and text should always be clear and visible; remember your customers are using a smaller screen!  When creating ads for Facebook marketing you are restricted to 20% text for all image ads, this is not a bad rule to follow when creating your images.

If you are just about to start on your website project then a mobile first approach may be the best choice you make in 2016.