6 Reasons Why Your Ecommerce Site Should Be Optimized for Mobile Devices
The ecommerce industry is constantly growing.
The number of global digital buyers is expected to hit an impressive 2.14 billion people by the end of 2021. It goes without saying that 2020 will be another game-changing year for ecommerce, bringing about a lot of new trends that brands will be dying to follow.
The number of global digital buyers is expected to hit an impressive 2.14 billion people by the end of 2021. It goes without saying that 2020 will be another game-changing year for ecommerce, bringing about a lot of new trends that… Click To TweetWith great potential and revenue opportunities comes the challenge of facing vast competition. While website optimization has become a standard, there is mobile optimization that now comes to the podium too. Optimization for mobile devices should be equally crucial for online retailers, even if some of them are not aware of it yet.
What Does It Actually Mean to Have Your Ecommerce Website Optimized?
1. M-commerce Is a Strong Trend
2. The Potential of Social Media
3. Browse Mobile, Shop via Desktop Trend
4. A Negative User Experience Can Cost You a Customer
5. Combined Millennials and Generation Z Have the Biggest Shopping Power
6. Search Engines Favour Online Stores Optimized for Mobile
Conclusion
Long story short: it’s fast-loading, intuitive and user-friendly. Indeed, many ecommerce sites already tick all of those boxes, shoppers can easily find their desired products on such websites and seamlessly finalize a purchase.
However, it often turns out that while the customer experience on desktop is a breeze, the mobile one just doesn’t live up to the clients’ expectations. Furthermore, while the mobile sector does notice a booming growth month by month, it is still becoming crystal clear that mobile optimization is not a choice, it is a must.
Why should you optimize your ecommerce site for mobile devices? What should you take into account when planning your optimization efforts, and how can you benefit from it? If you’ve ever looked for some answers to these questions, look no further and keep reading to become a mobile optimization pro.
Mobile commerce (m-commerce) describes any monetary transaction completed using a mobile device. It is not a new term, but now it matters more than ever before. Especially for online retailers.
Nearly eight-in-ten Americans are online shoppers, and more than half use mobile devices for that purpose. This number alone shows how significant mobile traffic is for ecommerce, and there are more statistics to follow that prove the point. With so many people using smartphones and tablets, it is a natural consequence that the potential of mobile commerce is growing. A mobile shopping experience should be as quick and easy as it is when it comes to desktop purchasing.
Nearly eight-in-ten Americans are online shoppers, and more than half use mobile devices for that purpose. This number alone shows how significant mobile traffic is for ecommerce Click To Tweet
The mobile payment market has been on the rise for the last couple of years and it’s expected to speed up the pace. (Source)
If you think about the circumstances of m-commerce then you may realize what your customers’ needs are. They use smartphones or tablets not only at home, but very often when they are on the go; to save time or to entertain themselves with a buyer journey. Nevertheless, responsive web design is a must-have to bring you profit. If the mobile experience of your ecommerce business is terrifying rather than terrific, then you can see a huge bounce rate and the rise of cart abandonment of high value without winning them back.
In other words: you’ll lose those customers who put their mobile shopping on a pedestal and choose it over purchasing on desktop. Your website should be mobile-optimized from head to toe – double-check it. From every single description, through the process of adding products to the cart or applying discount codes, and to the payment methods you offer.
It sounds like a struggle, but you simply need to do it.
The rising usage of mobile devices is also a reason why you should invest in mobile marketing. Advertising on social media and making the most of social commerce combined with m-commerce seems like the only right choice for online stores who want to reach more people and therefore sell more.
We live in an era where consumers are pretty much glued to the phone. They may see a product on their Instagram feed, research it online and buy it in a heartbeat. In the past, they had to go to the brick-and-mortar store, rethink their shopping impulses, and then maybe buy it online if the product still ticked all the boxes.
The statistics only prove this point.
80% Americans shop online and 50% of them use mobile devices for their shopping sprees. In Europe, the numbers look even more promising for retailers. Click To TweetWhen it comes to social media platforms, 55% of American shoppers have bought something online after discovering it on SoMe. In many cases, simple browsing on social media may result in an immediate purchase, if you apply some special solutions to your social media strategy.
Social media platforms deliver some special solutions dedicated to online stores. The shop section on Facebook enables shortening of a customer’s path. Users can browse your products via Facebook and visit the page of a given product directly from the shop section. Facebook can definitely up your ecommerce game, since 85% of orders from social media sites actually come from there. Moreover, both Facebook and Instagram (also Instagram Stories) offer a helpful feature that allows tagging products in a brand’s posts. Is that all that social media platforms have to offer? Absolutely not.
Facebook is still an unquestionable leader when it comes to referrals to ecommerce sites. (Source)
According to the above stats, Facebook plays a major role in attracting people and making them willing to purchase – it drives over 80% of revenue. However, Pinterest can be a real gem here, and a dark horse for e-commerce owners. That is why you should be interested in Buyable Pins on Pinterest. If you put all of your efforts into social media advertising, but your website offers poor mobile performance, then the statistics will be pretty ruthless for you, showing a huge bounce rate and wasted potential. That is why you need to find the golden mean between social media advertising and providing a flawless mobile experience.
When running social media campaigns, link directly to advertised products or product categories. That way, consumers can visit the page that they wanted to get to in the first place by clicking on the ad. If you want your social media ads to convert, you have to apply responsive web design, so as not to lose customers due to a negative mobile shopping experience.
When running social media campaigns, link directly to advertised products or product categories. That way, consumers can visit the page that they wanted to get to in the first place by clicking on the ad. Click To TweetEven if you do not run any paid campaigns or do not wish to implement the shop section on any social media platforms, you need to take into consideration that people can still reach your website directly from social media platforms on their mobile devices. If they encounter a website that is, frankly speaking, chaotic, then your business can suffer from a lack of conversions despite satisfying mobile traffic.
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Another trend is for customers to browse the offer of online stores on mobile devices just to finalize the transaction at home via desktop. 67% of Australian customers admit they tend to do “digital window shopping” for fun, while 77% of them make impulse purchases while doing it.
Research is an essential aspect of shopping. With so many competitors, you should be aware of the increased choice that your customers have, especially when it comes to professional equipment, electronics, luxury goods, and other expensive products. If you amaze them with your ecommerce site on mobile devices, it is likely that they will come back with pleasure to pay you quite a few bucks for products bought via desktop, but you may be surprised with other outcomes too.
If mobile shopping in your online store will be hassle-free and your offer turns out to be appealing enough, visitors might succumb to shopping impulses and finalize a transaction immediately. This is actually not a rare phenomenon now – this is a legal requirement of customers and the demand of having a great mobile experience. While they still do not turn back from researching things on mobile, they do not have to turn to desktop to hit the magic button and pay for the goods either. That is why your website should be user-friendly for mobile users, and should secure them some quick and safe options of browsing, purchasing and paying for their orders.
A website optimized for mobile devices that helps to make a purchasing decision should definitely have easy-to-scan product descriptions, preferably with bullet points and exposed value propositions. Customers do not buy features; they buy benefits that come along with the specification.
Making your website mobile-friendly should therefore be taken as an investment, not an expense, and it can pay back in no time. While ROPO always stood for Research Online, Purchase Offline, and reverse ROPO means Research Offline, Purchase Online, we are now at the threshold of a new ROPO, based on both researching and purchasing online.
It doesn’t matter whether your desktop website is perfectly optimized or still in need of improvement – what matters is the overall customer experience. While refurbishing your site and following ecommerce trends, you must pay attention to responsive web design.
Google claims that if customers have a negative experience with a brand, they are 62% less likely to come back to your store in the future. Needless to say that all of your future efforts of getting that customer back may be in vain, if your competitors got them on board already. There is no other cure for that; no exciting campaign will do the trick. The only solution is to create an excellent customer experience by perfecting each stage of a buyer’s journey.
According to MarketWatch, 88% of American shoppers who purchased products and services via mobile had a negative user experience, and 30% of them were deterred enough to never enter a particular site again. Stats are inexorable for retailers, and unsatisfied customers won’t wait ages to jump ship.
What could be a negative experience when it comes to an online store? For example, too many and unclear CTAs, too slow page loading times, unreadable text, annoying pop-ups, a required registration, a complicated menu, lack of helpful filters, non-working payment methods and anything else that you can associate with an unintuitive design. And it is just to name a few potential reasons of your site being rejected in the eyes of visitors! Don’t count on your potential clients to come back to your desktop site if they were offered a really bad mobile experience first.
How does the fact that both of the generations mentioned above have become the largest cohort of shoppers to influence your online store? You should keep that in mind not only when revamping your offer or social media campaigns, but also when it comes to website design and its optimization.
Among consumers that represent Millennials and Generation Z, 53% chose mobile as their preferred device for apparel shopping – and it is only a drop in the ocean of statistics we could recall here.
Remember that your target group is constantly changing, not only when it comes to replacing older cohorts of customers with younger ones, but also within the same generations. Your customers, as well as the whole society, are evolving depending on technological innovations, economic status, and shopping preferences. To conquer the market, you need to follow the trends and keep adapting to satisfy consumers and therefore, increase your online store’s revenue.
Long story short: providing a smooth mobile experience grants you success and can help you win some new customers, whilst keeping the current ones loyal and satisfied.
Last, but definitely not the least reason why you should implement a responsive web design is the impact on search engine results. While running an ecommerce business, you probably work really hard to rank high on Google’s search engine results page. An optimized online store is easy-to-find in Google because it is ranked higher, but did you know that it also applies to mobile versions?
Search engines take responsive web designs in their algorithms as one of the factors that determine a website’s position in the results. That is because they have a customer-centric approach so that they pay attention to user experience. Even if (somehow) you still want to focus on desktop visitors, at the same time you need to improve your mobile online store to reach your target group via search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Slow-loading pages will face the consequences of lower positions in Google, and therefore less traffic, and therefore less income. Google officially uses the loading speed as a metric for mobile search result rankings, so there is no way around it and you can lose a lot by leaving your ecommerce site optimized for desktop visitors only.
Can you live without an ecommerce site optimized for mobile devices? Can you business still be up and running without it?
Sure it can. But it can, and most likely will, suffer the consequences of lower traffic, higher bounce rate or abandoned carts. It goes without saying that it may affect the level of customer satisfaction pretty soon. It does not sound too appealing to ecommerce business owners, we must admit.
We hope that now you do not only understand the importance of ecommerce optimization for mobile devices, but you’ve already decided to do it immediately or improve your mobile performance nevertheless.
During any optimization, you should try out a few options to get the best results. A/B testing is an excellent method to figure out the most useful solutions and increase ecommerce conversion. Turning visitors into buyers is a challenge, but with some good support on board you can reach your business goals quicker.
If you are looking for a partner in ecommerce crime, then here at Growcode we know a thing or two about ecommerce. If you are looking to grow your business and increase conversion rates, we are happy to help you as well!
💡 At Growcode, we develop and maintain online shops and B2B ecommerce on Magento!
