There is a growing trend for consumers to do shopping online rather than visiting a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Recent data shows that 4 out of 10 users make purchases from their smartphone devices. What is the best way to increase sales from mobile users? As an eCommerce store owner, you have the power to wow your mobile customers and encourage them towards conversions.
Millennials and mobile is not a cliché, but a fact and today’s reality. Statistics show that 85% of millennials have smartphones and they access them 157 times a day. They are always buried deep into their smartphones. This is a huge population of young and potential customers for online store owners to tap into.
Given below are 7 tips to help optimize the mobile experience of your e-commerce eCommerce store.
Offering a simple shopping experience
Customers should find it extremely easy and convenient to shop from their mobile devices. Making the process simple and easy to navigate and offering a seamless shopping experience would not only attract new customers but would also ensure repeat customers.
Mobile shopping offers convenience. Take advantage of this factor to link directly to a product page and offer similar products they might like, based on their purchase history.
Moreover, shoppers expect that the information that they get on their phones is the same as on a desktop. Hence, they are more likely to make purchases from their phones. About two-thirds of young travelers plan an entire trip on their smartphones, as compared to travelers in the age group of 35 years and older. One of the best ways to simplify and enhance the mobile shopping experience is by implementing a PWA (Progressive Web App), which offers a native app-like experience without the hassles of memory hogs and additional downloads.
An example of an amazing and delightful shopping experience is Starbucks, where they scan the barcode of select smartphones of customers as a payment method, at the Point of Sale.
Create a mobile user experience that only your mobile eCommerce users can do. For example, Uber has a feature where the users can track their booked vehicles and interact with the driver. This is a great way to encourage customer engagement on a mobile app.
Images, videos, and content for mobile
Your website, landing pages, emails, and digital content should be mobile-friendly. Clunky website experiences are a thing of the past and are unacceptable. A smart thing to do would be to use a design that can recognize if the user is on a desktop or a mobile and then change the layout accordingly so that the browsing and shopping becomes a delightful experience. An important point here would be for the online store owner to decide the best mobile-friendly design to use for their business. While designing your web pages, you should keep mobile users in mind first.
There is no guarantee that the high-quality images and videos that you use for a desktop would have the same impact on mobile devices. Ensure that the products on your images are highlighted very well, they occupy most of the mobile frame and when shoppers zoom in on these images, they are crisp enough to withstand the viewers’ scrutiny. Your videos should work fine and make sense without the audio because most times the user is accessing your site in a crowded place, like on a bus or train.
Live streaming videos are exciting, interesting, and engaging. They add urgency to your interactions with users, who are most likely to watch them on their mobile devices. Followers can watch, react and comment in real-time. You can also respond to your audience with immediacy.
A large population of smartphone users is on Instagram. What is the best way to enhance their mobile experience through this medium? Encourage them to share their pictures along with your product or service and give them a branded hashtag. Keep your content crisp and do not overload the pages.
Reduce the time to load
Generally, it is found that mobile users have very little patience to wait for a website to load; surprisingly the waiting period is only 10 seconds. If the wait time is any longer than this, the user loses interest and looks elsewhere. Potential customers could also be lost if the checkout page is too slow and the rate of abandoned shopping carts increases.
Secure mobile checkouts
Many shoppers are quite uncomfortable about entering their financial details on unknown networks. Offering them popular mobile wallet options such as Google Wallet, PayPal, and Visa Checkouts could ease users’ security concerns and also eliminate the hassle of entering a long series of numbers on small mobile devices. On your policies page, you could reassure customers about the steps that you are taking to protect their data and keep them safe.
Social Media Connectivity
The importance of the connectivity between your online store, social media, and mobile devices cannot be undermined. The content should be powerful because most smartphone users access their social media accounts through their devices and they prefer to use the social media channel to communicate with businesses. Treat your followers with respect and respond to messages and comments immediately.
Make use of Mobile’s Context-Aware Functionality
Take advantage of the location awareness feature of smartphones; find out who your customer is, where they are and what they are doing currently. Based on this data, you can send location-based messages and also use mobile chat to elevate mobile user experiences.
Trained customer service personnel
It would be a huge mistake to have the same staff for your eCommerce store and your mobile app service. There should be a separate team of professionals who are trained and have experience in handling queries and customers in the mobile commerce space.
Online store owners have direct access to mobile users. But they should make sure that they do not flood users with messages. Offer valuable, personalized promotions through brief and point-to-the-point messages. You do not want customers to be put off by your brand forever!
Mobile eCommerce is quite challenging and is not easy. It is getting harder by the day. But the efforts that are put in to create an amazing mobile experience for your online store will show results.
Organic marketing and branding expert at Capillary Technologies. Capillary helps brands to retain customers and increase sales through enterprise platforms like customer loyalty software, enterprise ecommerce software, footfall counter and CRM. In free time, loves to go on trekking. A nature and bird lover.
