Mobile commerce has been a popular term since I stepped in the industry about 10 years ago. But I haven’t seen that many brands or retailers have taken mobile users very seriously; although most agencies talk about “mobile-first”, it still means a responsive site design for almost everyone.
Did you know that 55% of all ecommerce orders are placed on mobile devices, and 73% of all digital traffic comes from mobile? If you haven’t developed a mobile strategy for your business, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.
Here is a practical example, a small brand has 99,845 visitors a month, mobile 55.66% and desktop 44.34%, mobile orders 613 and desktop orders 1,106. When the average order value was £194.15, the actual cost of low mobile conversion was £150,660 in a single month. Problem with this brand was the non-optimized mobile product cart and a too complex navigation, with tens of sub-categories which made the mobile shopping experience too difficult and slow.
Mobile optimization gained 50% of their mobile sales, and gave over 1,400.00% ROI.
It’s not fair to expect that mobile commerce has the same conversion rate as desktop, but even mobile users are often distracted by incoming phone calls, messages and notifications; a 2-4 times gap between mobile and desktop is too much, and if your numbers are like that, you have to react and improve your mobile performance.
Here’s few practical examples on how to improve your mobile performance
1) Product Card Design
I’ve seen significant improvement in mobile performance when the add-to-cart button has been lifted. If the add-to-cart button is too low, and the user has to scroll 3-5 mobile screens down to add the product to the cart, your added-to-cart rate will be weaker with mobile devices and that directly affects your conversion rate.
Tip: Sticky Add-to-cart button can improve your mobile added-to-cart rate
2) Navigation
Complex navigation makes the mobile users’ user experience more difficult, and when mobile users have to do too many clicks to find what they are looking for, they more often leave the website than add products to the cart.
Tip: You should include just the most important and most popular categories to the mobile navigation.
3) Search
On-site search engines gain popularity all the time, for example, Amazon and Google shopping educates users to use product search. With mobile devices, search is the easiest way to find the right products and categories.
4) Loading time
If your website is slow that affects directly to your mobile performance but it will also hurt your search engine visibility on Google. If your website loads fast on a desktop, it doesn’t automatically mean that your website loads fast with mobile devices. Regardless, the slow loading time will make users leave your site, and you will see a higher bounce rate and lower conversion rate. You can get more information about Loading time from here.
Even if mobile traffic is a majority on many sites, it doesn’t mean that you should do everything mobile-first, you have to develop all screen sizes mobile, tablet, and desktop to provide the best possible user experience for your customers, no matter which device they are using.