Mobile E-Commerce

Did you know that mobile e-commerce spending is set to overtake desktop spending by 2023?

Furthermore, mobile traffic accounts for over half of all web traffic worldwide.

What does this mean for your business?

To put it simply, if you are not already optimising your website for mobile devices and making it easy for your customers to make a purchase via their smartphones, you are unlikely to survive the year.

This may sound extreme, but, unfortunately, it is true.

Fortunately, all you need to do is keep reading to discover how you can optimise your site and its content for mobile e-commerce, allowing you to keep up with your competitors and thrive in 2021 and beyond.

What is mobile e-commerce?

Mobile e-commerce, also known as m-commerce, refers to any monetary transaction that iscarried out on a mobile device. This could be in-app purchasing, mobile banking, virtual marketplace apps such as the Amazon mobile app, or a digital wallet like Android Pay.

An extension of e-commerce, which refers to any monetary transaction made over the internet, mobile e-commerce is set to become the most popular way to make purchases online in the next few years.

What are the benefits of mobile e-commerce?

Mobile e-commerce has the unique ability to help both customers and businesses, with the most obvious benefits listed below:

• Faster purchases: With no need to pull data from a server, users can browse and shop more quickly using their mobiles.
• Enhanced user experience: A custom made app offers speed, convenience, and ease of use, providing a much greater shopping experience.
• Better analytics: Providing you with access to your customers’ demographics, locations, and purchase histories, you can offer the products they want at the right time and in the right place.
• Increased scalability: Use mobile data to improve your marketing campaigns and to make better inventory decisions.

How can I optimise for mobile e-commerce?

The first step, and hopefully one that you have already completed, is to ensure that your website operates on a responsive design model. This means that it adapts itself to different devices and screen resolutions.

On top of having a responsive site, there are several other techniques that you can adopt to make your e-commerce site even more mobile-friendly.

1.   Make your most important pages accessible

Navigational features are limited on mobile devices, so you need to work even harder to make sure your customers can easily find the most important elements of your site. These include your main menu, product pages, posts, and linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages..

2.   Make sure your website loading times are fast

A slow website on your desktop is annoying; a slow website on your mobile is a deal-breaker. In a nutshell, if your site does not load fast enough on mobile devices, your customers will go elsewhere, and they may never come back. Ideally, your website should take no longer than 3 seconds to load.

Speed up your website loading time by keeping redirectsA redirect is a web page that loads in place of another web page. down, using compressed images, simplifying your web design, and activating Google’s AMP.

3.   Keep your checkout process simple

As mobile devices have much smaller screens than tablets or desktop computers, you need to make sure that the checkout process is simple, concise, and easy to complete. Opt for clear content, bold buttons, and avoid reformatting where possible.

Another great technique is to use progress bars so that users can see where they are in their mobile checkout process. This will reduce shopping bag abandonment and make users feel more in control of their purchasing journey.

4.   Optimise your visuals

Users spend much more time consuming images and video content than they do the written word, and using these techniques on your e-commerce site can enhance engagement and help users understand your products.

However, if your visuals are taking too long to load, failing to load at all, or cannot be viewed properly, you will lose the interest of your customers.

5.   Reduce content

Although you may have heard over and over again that content is king and vital for your overall SEO strategy, if the content you use cannot be viewed or is hard to consume on a mobile device, it doesn’t matter how good it is.

Avoid content issues by opening your site via your mobile device and checking that it can be consumed in its entirety. Rectify any odd spacing, areas of blank space, or sections that are too text-heavy.

Conclusion

If you have not yet paid enough attention to mobile optimisation, don’t worry, it’s not too late. Every day there are new potential customers looking for products just like yours via their mobile device. Whether they find you or not is up to you.

Not sure you have the time or the expertise to optimise your ecommerce site for mobiles?

We can help you. We understand that mobile e-commerce optimisation is intrinsically linked to user experience and that once you have that key element in the bag, you will attract more high-quality traffic, and, in turn, more sales.

What are you waiting for? Embrace mobile commerce and see your business soar.