According to eMarketer, the global eCommerce sales is estimated to reach $2.774 trillion this year. E-commerce industry has seen phenomenal growth over the years and being an digital commerce agency we have been empowering businesses to get an edge over the competition with out-of-the-box digital commerce solutions.
However, we found that many e-commerce websites are facing a common issue, that is, although they are getting huge traffic from mobile users, but their conversion rates are low since most of them are not completing the purchase via mobile devices. In spite of the fact that mobile users have been increasing exponentially in the recent years, mobile traffic is catching up or even surpassing the desktop traffic; mobile conversions are still lagging behind than desktop conversions.
In this post, we’re going to answer the question: “How to improve e-commerce conversion rates for mobile devices?” But before that, let’s take a look at the reasons for desktop still dominating conversion rates.
- Web Pages and resources usually load quickly as desktop internet connectivity tend to be strong.
- Search bars are often robust and prominent; thus rendering seamless experience.
- The main menu, with multiple category options, being large and prominent is easily accessible on the desktop.
- Offers large and detailed view of product images.
- Product category feeds with multiple products are clearly visible, all at once or with advanced filter options.
- Checkout experience on the desktop seems to be more reliable
- Space is not a constraint, which means larger images, more menus, and more products which would lead to the enhanced user experience.
- Network speed makes comfortable desktop shopping experiences
Why Doesn’t Mobile Users Convert?
In the era when smartphones are used on the go, when people don’t have time to shop, just think if people weren’t shopping on mobile at all, there would be no web traffic from smartphones to eCommerce sites. According to Forrester, up to 30% of traffic to major websites comes from mobile. Here are some tried and tested tips from our team of digital commerce experts to improve mobile e-commerce conversion rates:
1. Polish Mobile User Experience
M-commerce conversions can be improved by delivering great user experience on mobile devices. This involves ensuring that users can navigate your website effortlessly, find out the items they are looking for quickly, and complete the checkout process seamlessly on mobile devices.
Simplify your navigation
To simplify the navigation for mobile users, arrange all the page elements neatly so that users can browse through your website in a well-organized manner. Consider displaying the product image in a page prominently followed by pricing and visible CTA button. For more information, users can scroll down and see the product description and can view images of the product from different angles.
Ensure better readability
As mobile screens are smaller in size, keep the page clutter-free. Ensure that your copy is legible and customers can read it properly by avoiding fonts that are very small and require zooming to be read. Also, make sure that the font color clearly contrasts with the background color for easy readability and align the texts properly – central align short bits of texts and left align larger chunks of texts.
2. Prioritize Website Performance
Slow page load speed is truly frustrating while browsing via mobile devices and users tend to abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
According to Google, if a page takes one second to seven seconds to load then the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 113 percent. These figures are enough to highlight the significance of speed when optimizing conversions on mobile devices. Therefore, if you’re looking to reduce bounce rates and see a lot of conversions on your site then work on increasing your page load speed as it is highly crucial to improving mobile eCommerce conversion rates.
Consider these following tips to boost website performance:
Reduce server response time
If your server is taking longer to respond to a request, your page will take longer to load. To minimize the server response time you can: Enhance the configuration of your web server, or enhance the quality of web hosting service you are currently using. It should take less than 200 milliseconds to respond to a request ideally.
Use GZip compression to reduce file size
Large files would take longer to be transferred to the browser; hence reduce the size of files to make sure that your site loads faster. You can try gzip compression to minimize the size of your files, especially images.
Avoid redirects
Many times, page loading speed is low due to redirects as they use valuable milliseconds. Therefore, try to avoid redirects to give your website speed a significant boost. You can first analyze the number of redirects and then try minimizing them.
3. Create Seamless Checkout Experience
As per Facebook IQ report, 26% of buyers switch to desktop screens to complete their purchases because they find it uncomfortable to enter personal data on mobile devices. This indicates that it is important to optimize the checkout process and here are some tips for checkout page optimization:
Keep checkout pages short and precise
Long and complicated checkout pages might scare some shoppers as they find them very awkward to navigate on mobile devices. You can think of breaking down long pages into multiple pages which have the “Next” button on them.
Moreover, implementing a progress indicator can intensify user experience as the users would come to know how many steps are involved and how long the path to checkout is going to take.
Minimize fields in the checkout form
The shoppers would appreciate if you keep the checkout process as simple as possible for them. So, reduce the amount of information they need to enter to complete a purchase.
Give them a choice to register by using their social media account and create seamless checkout experience for your customers.
4. Strong Tactile Cues for Effective Interactivity
By providing a real-time response on your e-commerce site, you can enhance user experience and interactivity too. Displaying a visual cue when an item is added to the cart helps users know that the product has been successfully added to the cart.
When they are completing forms, visual indicators showing that those fields are valid will ensure faster form filling and a clear indication of receiving order would also improve order accuracy.
Although, tactile response is important across all the devices, however, it is indispensable for ensuring mobile conversions. In flaky networks an action might fail because of dropped network connection, tactile cues enables users to understand if that happened and decide if they should try submitting order once again.
Bottom Line
Those mentioned above are the essential mobile commerce conversion optimization tips, but every site and every market are different. The conversion optimization process took years on the desktop, and there’s no reason to assume it’ll be any faster in mobile. You need to be patient and test rigorously to make sure you understand exactly where users are getting stuck, and why.
Testing is especially important if you’re making a mobile commerce app. Rather than launching something adequate and then iterating, you need to launch something that’s great.
How do you boost your mobile e-commerce conversion rates? How do you ensure that the shopping experience for your mobile audience is frictionless? We would love to hear from you; please leave your comments below and enlighten our readers by your insights.
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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Mobile Marketing in eCommerce
10 March, 2023 Customers are commanding a different experience. It hinges on mobile. The device is not the future of marketing, it’s the present. Today, the customer journey often begins and ends on a smartphone. So, as a marketer, it’s your job to engage with your customers on their choice of device. Marketers can’t ignore the surge in M-Commerce, as consumers command an experience that rests on mobile optimization. Brands need to prioritize the mobile marketing in their eCommerce strategies.
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