Best Tips to Improve your Mobile eCommerce Site

Statista predicts that by 2021, global mobile ecommerce sales will amount to 3.5 trillion dollars, and mobiles will account for 72.9% of all online sales. If you’re an ecommerce seller but haven’t optimized your store for mobiles, then you’re leaving money on the table

One of the main reasons why most shoppers prefer mobiles is that it’s convenient, quick, and on the go. However, most ecommerce sellers fail to provide mobile shoppers with an enhanced shopping experience on their smartphones. Merely converting your existing web portal into a responsive mobile website is not sufficient to meet the high expectations of today’s savvy customers.

Here are a few design tips to enhance the UX journey of customers who shop from mobile devices.

1: Simplify the Customer Buying Journey

Statista reveals that the average time users spend browsing ecommerce sites from mobile devices in 2019 is just four minutes. As an ecommerce site owner, you just have a few minutes to convince site visitors to make positive buying decisions.

Keep your site design simple while conveying all the necessary information to the visitor. The customer buying journey must be laid out clearly, with a defined path to take the customer from product selection to the payment.

Remember, you have less than four minutes to complete the entire process. So, you cannot afford to distract the customer.

A Common Mistake to Avoid: Premature Upselling

This is a common mistake made by several ecommerce stores. Very often, online retail sites try to sell additional products to the customer before the initial purchase is completed. There are two reasons why this doesn’t work:

• Upselling before the customer has completed the purchase is loading him/her with excessive information and additional decisions. This increases the risk of the customer abandoning the cart
• Upselling works better when a customer has already purchased from your brand.

The effective strategy here is to get your Magento2 or Woocommerce specialists to design the site in such a way that upselling happens after the purchase and not before it. Once a customer has completed the payment, you can display a list of similar products, he/she would be interested in.

2: Focus on the Design of the Search Feature

The search box is a crucial component of the customer conversion journey, but sadly it’s often neglected. Site visitors can quickly find the product they are looking for without having to navigate through multiple categories.

While on the topic of search, here are a few factors to consider:

• Does your search button provide an auto-complete feature?
• Can you include previews of product images as part of your search result?
• Should you opt for a search – bar, tab, or the magnifying glass icon?
• Should the search bar be positioned at the top of the screen or the bottom?
• Will filtered search work better for your customers? Let’s say – you own a large online store with a vast inventory. Providing filters, along with the search, helps customers find what they are looking for quickly, with just a few taps. To give an example, you can add filters to help customers search based on price ranges, product type, etc.

Finding the answers to the questions listed here with the help of Magento 2 experts will help you provide your customers with an enhanced search experience on your mobile ecommerce site.

3: Improve Site Loading Speeds

Sites that take too long to load are a cardinal sin in 2019 and beyond. Most people shop from mobile devices because it is convenient, fast, and while on the go. If your site takes a long time to load, then you can be sure that your customer will not wait around.

According to Google, 53% of mobile visitors leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Google also states that while most users have switched to 4G, the page loading times are still slow, and the majority of mobile sites are bloated.

When it comes to mobile ecommerce sites, the faster your pages load, the lower are your bounce rates. Here are a few tips to help you reduce page loading times:

• Use the PageSpeed Insights API – It helps you measure the performance of your webpage by pulling in real-time data from various sources. It also gives you suggestions on how to increase the performance of your webpage.
• Reduce Redirects – The more the number of redirects, the higher is your page loading time. Analyze the number of redirects on your mobile ecommerce site using online tools and try to reduce the number of redirects.
• Aim for Lean Pages – According to Google, by simply compressing image sizes, and text on your website can help you significantly improve page load times.

4: Be Mindful of the Thumb Zone

One study states that 49% of people hold their mobile phones in one hand, and 75% use only their thumbs for the major actions. The screen of a mobile device can be divided into – natural, stretching, and hard to reach zones based on thumb movement.

Make sure that your ecommerce website design services provider places the essential and scrollable parts of your mobile site in the areas that fall within the natural reach of the thumb. Other less frequently used elements of the design can be placed on the stretched and hard-to-reach zones.

Another factor to consider here is that avoid creating tiny clickable links that are frustrating for people to tap on. Tiny clickable links have plenty of chances to lead to wrong actions and annoy the user. Turn your design elements into wider boxes that cannot go wrong.

5: Follow the Three-Tap Rule

This is an unwritten rule that can do wonders for your ecommerce site conversions. Remember, that simpler the UX, better are the conversions.

The three-tap rule is a simple rule which states that all it should take is three taps for the customer from the time he/she lands on the home page to get to their desired products. Here’s a typical customer journey:

• The user lands on the homepage and makes the first tap to choose the product category.
• The second tap is on selecting the sub-category.
• The final tap takes the user to the product page.

From the product page, the customer should be able to land directly at the final checkout page.

6: Don’t Rely on Pinch Zooming

While pinch-zooming was trending a couple of years ago, this design style has quickly become a relic of the past. Currently, mobile ecommerce site design is all about proportions. Simply put, every element of your mobile design must be proportional to the screen. Fonts and images should be displayed clearly without requiring the user to zoom in by pinching the screen.

While an ecommerce site is mostly about the product images, product descriptions play a crucial role as well. Most customers look for more information about the product before they click on the “Add to Cart” button.

Here are a few typography tips to optimize the user reading experience:

• Avoid using fonts that are too small to read.
• Also, avoid filling up the entire page with large letters. Ideally, having around 30 – 40 characters per line boosts readability.
• Make sure that the font color you have chosen contrasts well with the background color.

7: Finally, Don’t Forget to Optimize the Shopping Cart

Recent figures state that shopping cart abandonment rates stand at 69.57% in 2019, that’s around – $4.6 trillion worth of merchandise.

Very often, most ecommerce site owners focus more on the product pages and landing pages, that they ignore a crucial aspect of the conversion funnel – the shopping cart. Here are a few tips to optimize your shopping cart design:

• Avoid the confirmation, instead, send out a notification – Instead of asking your customers whether they want to add a product to the cart, just send out a notification informing them that it has been added to the cart.
• Avoid long checkout pages – Remember that your users are typing on a mobile device, using an on-screen keyboard. Try to limit the information you’re collecting from the customer, and ask only for the essential details.
• Give customers the option to checkout without creating a user profile. If customers want to check-out as a guest, they should be able to do so.
• Make sure that the shopping cart lists all details about the products like – size, quantity, price, etc. – so that customer can continue the process, without coming back to the product page to confirm the details.
• If you’ve enabled discount codes, make sure that this field is accessible without the customer having to search for it.

Focus on Simplifying the UX

If you don’t have the time or technical expertise to implement the tips listed here, worry not! You can choose the best SEO services and mobile ecommerce website design provider to work on your ecommerce store using the guidelines mentioned above.

Remember that ultimately, the aim of your online store is to provide customers with a painless user experience that gets them to complete the buying journey and converts them into repeat customers.