7 Ways to Optimize Your Mobile Commerce Site
As the use of smartphones has increased, it has become vital for eCommerce businesses to optimize for mobile devices. As a result, mobile commerce (a.k.a mCommerce) has become essential. This article covers seven tips to help eCommerce businesses become mobile-ready.
Source: Meetanshi.com
Do you know that your mobile device has the power to skyrocket your online business? The number of mobile devices has increased drastically in the last few years and is expected to grow further in the upcoming years.
According to Statista, there were over 7 billion mobile phone users in 2021, which is expected to increase even further in 2022. Considering such massive penetration, optimizing eCommerce sites for mobile devices becomes inevitable for wide coverage.
Many online business owners struggle with providing the best mCommerce shopping experience to their customers. This article covers everything about mCommerce along with the seven best actionable tips to optimize mobile commerce to boost conversions and sales.
Planning to design and develop a mobile-friendly e-commerce website? Check out our directory of e-commerce web design and development companies.
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What is Mobile Commerce?
Source: Meetanshi.com
Mobile Commerce is a subset of eCommerce that refers to online transactions, payment of bills, and purchases on handheld devices such as smartphones or tablets. As the term suggests, commercial activities are carried out on mobile devices in mCommerce. It can be anything from booking online tickets, attending paid seminars, or buying products online.
The omnipresence of the internet has boosted the growth of mCommerce in the last few years. To support this, one report revealed that the mCommerce sales in the US exceeded $360 billion in 2021, which is expected to double by the year 2025. Magento store owners can get a mobile app developed for their business using Magento Mobile App Development.
What are the Benefits of mCommerce?
Source: Meetanshi.com
Mobile devices make it possible for customers to shop from anywhere.
If you are an eCommerce business owner and not leveraging mCommerce, then you are surely missing something big for a couple of reasons. Let me explain to you the benefits of mobile commerce to understand this better.
Benefits of mCommerce
- Better audience reach
- Smoother customer experience
- Build customer loyalty
- High return on investment
- Gather important data
Better Audience Reach
Mobile devices have evolved as an effective marketing channel for online businesses. Getting your eCommerce site ready for handheld internet devices simply means covering a broader and potential customer base.
Moreover, Google also loves sites that are mobile-friendly and prioritizes them for better rankings. You can also enjoy the SEO benefits of having a mobile-compatible eCommerce store for better audience reach.
Smoother Customer Experience
Shopping online through mobile devices is quick, smooth, and frictionless. mCommerce nullifies the need for visiting the physical store and allows the customers to shop right from their mobile devices. The mobile sites are much faster and quicker than the desktops sites, adding a frictionless experience for customers.
Moreover, another added benefit of mCommerce is that it allows the customers to place the order and complete the payment on the same device.
Build Customer Loyalty
Convenience is the key to success in online businesses. mCommerce provides the most convenient shopping experience to customers. mCommerce has the power to provide an unforgettable experience to the customers that help build customer loyalty and brand in the long run.
Customers are more likely to return to your store if they had a hassle-free experience with your store in the past.
High Return on Investment
Making your eCommerce store mobile-friendly or developing a mobile shopping app to leverage mCommerce is definitely worth the cost. One study by Google showed that 67% of the customers prefer shopping from a mobile-friendly site.
The overall experience of your store becomes a major conversing factor for the customers. Mobile commerce triumphs at providing a satisfactory and convenient experience to the customers leading to more conversions.
Gather Important Data
Mobile devices open doors for businesses to gather information about customers that help deliver a better shopping experience, analyze business, and make data-driven decisions.
For example, mCommerce can help businesses to understand the customer’s behavior , spending habits , and psychology. Moreover, mobile devices can also provide important data about the customers, such as location, to send personalized notifications.
7 Actionable Tips to Optimize mCommerce to Boost Sales
Source: Meetanshi.com
7 Tips to Optimize for mCommerce
- Responsive design
- Easy navigation and search
- Mobile payments
- Eliminate pop-ups
- Skimmable content
- Win shoppers’ trust
- Offer deals
1. Responsive Design
A responsive website is the most important thing you need to get started with mCommerce. It’s essential to ensure that your website works perfectly well across varying screen sizes of mobile devices. A responsive website design ensures that the customers will have a flawless shopping experience across multiple devices.
You may need to choose a mobile-responsive website design to kickstart your mobile commerce efforts. A mobile responsive eCommerce site can help deliver a quick, smooth, and flawless shopping experience to the customers that can have a lot more benefits for your business than you can ever imagine!
2. Easy Navigation & Search
You can optimize your mCommerce site for maximum conversions by helping customers find what they’re looking for in your store. Providing better navigational facilities such as breadcrumbs, menu bars, etc., can help drastically reduce the friction along the path to checkout for customers.
Providing search facilities such as smart suggestions, search by image, and voice search makes it easier for customers to find products and encourages them to convert to sales with a smooth shopping experience.
3. Mobile Payments
Payment is an important part of eCommerce that completes the deal and converts the visitor into a successful customer. It’s crucial for businesses to provide convenient payment options to mobile customers so that they can complete their orders seamlessly
Customers browsing your eCommerce site from their mobile device may find it highly convenient to complete their payments quickly using mobile wallets and payment apps. Offering mobile payment options such as Cards, Net Banking, and COD are essential to optimize your store for mCommerce.
4. Eliminate Pop-ups
Popups may seem like a great opportunity for you to get visitors’ attention. Unfortunately, they may block the view of your site for the mobile visitors, which can be annoying. Showing ads and popups on your mobile site distract the customer and may result in high bounce rates.
Such instances can result in a bad customer experience and may also affect your overall brand reputation. Therefore, it is highly essential to eliminate any kind of pop ups and advertisements from your site to optimize it for mobile commerce.
5. Skimmable Content
Content for mobile sites should be made with small smartphone screens in mind. Generally, mobile phone users browse the internet in a portrait view; even three lines of text content can look like a bulky boring paragraph to the mobile users.
It’s vital to keep content as concise as possible while focusing on the main goal of conversion. It’s also essential to ensure that CTAs are placed properly and are clearly visible to the users.
6. Win Shopper’s Trust
Most customers are concerned about payment security while shopping online. Therefore, at some point, winning visitors’ trust in your mCommerce site can also put you in the green zone.
Ensure that your site is PCI DSS compliant and meets the highest level of transaction security. Showcase the security standards of your store to the customers to win their trust.Moreover, you can also use reviews and social proof to prove your authenticity.
7. Offer Lucrative Deals
Discount offers, sales, and coupon codes never fail to entice visitors to purchase products online. You can try various online promotional offers, bundled discounts, and other deals to drive sales.
Providing limited-time discounts can help you grab customers’ attention and may persuade them to purchase products faster. Offering competitive pricing can also help you have an edge in your industry.
Bonus Tips to Optimize Your Mobile eCommerce Site
Source: Meetanshi.com
Provide a Wishlist
Sometimes, customers may want to purchase a product from your store, but it may not be the right time for them. In such cases, they may want to add items to a wishlist, from which they can easily find a product. Adding a wishlist functionality can greatly improve the shopping experience for your customers.
Later on, you can also leverage push notifications to remind the customers to complete their purchases. This creates a win-win situation for both your business and the customer. Moreover, products on the wishlist can also be used to analyze customers’ behavior and create personalized product recommendations.
Focus on the Thumb Zone
People generally navigate mobile commerce sites with their thumbs. Sometimes, the customers may require to stretch their thumb a little bit more to tap on the buy now button, which isn’t a pleasant experience.
Therefore, it is vital to make sure that the important elements of the website that require user interaction are within easy reach. A heatmap of how easy it is to reach different areas of the screen for the thumb is illustrated below.
Source: smashingmagazine.com
Additional reading, ‘3 Ideas for Mobile Menu Design.’
Simplify Checkout Process
‘The Shorter the process, the more the conversions’ - this statement holds true for mCommerce sites. Your site and content have encouraged the customer enough to purchase your product, but a complex checkout process can make him/her leave your site without completing the payment. Therefore, it is essential to simplify the checkout process to make it easy for the customers to make a purchase on your website.
Guest checkout, sign up, and log in using OTP, allowing mobile payments, etc., can help the customers to checkout on your online store easily.
Prompt Customer Service
Customer support is important when it comes to retention and building your brand name. Good customer support can fill the gaps that you had in your service or product and can encourage customers to continue shopping with your brand.
An easy way to handle most of the general customer queries in your mCommerce store is using a chatbot. Some convenient ways to allow customers to connect with you are WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, etc. If you are running an online store on Magento 2, you can use Magento 2 WhatsApp Contact.
Increase Sales by Optimizing for Mobile Commerce
Consumers are using their mobile devices to make purchases more often than ever before. To compete, companies must optimize their websites for MCommerce.
By creating a responsive mobile website that is easy to navigate, companies can expand their audience and provide a better customer experience.
As a result, they’ll improve customer loyalty and increase sales, making it well-worth the investment.
Planning to build a mobile-friendly platform to support your e-commerce business? Connect with top-rated ecommerce design and development companies through Top Design Firms.
Additional Reading
Need help selecting a company?
Based on your budget, timeline, and specifications we can help you build a shortlist of companies that perfectly matches your project needs. Get started by submitting your project details.