Although mobile users may have the lowest conversion rate, that’s beginning to change. Mobile accounted for 40 percent of sales this past Black Friday and drove 56 percent of retail site visits. Wondering what you can do to improve the mobile shopping experience this year?
Think like a mobile shopper
Look at your mobile site from the perspective of a visitor. How are they going to use your site? The UPS 2016 UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper found that 58 percent of survey respondents use their tablet and 56 percent use their smartphone to research an online purchase. When it comes time to buy, 44 percent said they use smartphones and tablets to purchase online.
“Mobile customers are more captive,” Jerry Hum, co-founder and CEO of Touch of Modern, an online retailer for men, recently told the National Retail Federation. “There’s limited screen space and they’re less likely to leave the funnel once they’ve entered. They’re also more likely to scroll and browse through lots of content quickly.”
Whether they’re using their mobile phone to review your returns policy or shopping for a new pair of shoes on their iPad, think about the different stages of the buying cycle and how someone viewing your website on a mobile device can get what they need so they go from browsing to buying in no time.
At minimum, is your website optimized for mobile? Are text, images and videos formatted so they’re clear and crisp on a smaller screen? Is it easy to browse your product lineup? Is it easy to search for products? Does your mobile site have a helpful FAQ page?
Improving mobile checkout
Making checkout easier on mobile devices should be a priority for online retailers to capture this growing audience. Wondering how to do this? Here are a few ways you can simplify the checkout process for your mobile shoppers:
- Keep your checkout process to a minimum and provide a status bar so your customers know how close they are to completing their purchase
- Allow shoppers to checkout as a guest—not everyone wants to commit to creating a new customer account
- Provide more than one payment method (for example, credit card and PayPal)
- Make sure your app is optimized for mobile throughout the buying cycle, including your shopping cart and checkout process. If your checkout pages aren’t optimized for mobile, all those fields your customer needs to complete might be hard to see and navigate.
- Remove the standard header and social buttons from your mobile checkout process—you’ve (almost) got the sale so switch your tactic from pitching products to order fulfillment.
- Make text input fields big enough that they’re easy to read
- Only request essential information (like payment information, shipping and billing addresses and customer contact information) – this isn’t the time to ask getting-to-know-you questions or to include a checkbox to opt in for special promotions.
- Don’t ask your customer to input information when you can do it for them—use an autofill function to complete the city and state fields once the customer inputs their ZIP code
Making sure your ecommerce operations are dynamic and user-friendly for all users, no matter how they view your website, is sure to help you grow sales and revenue in the future.