4 Ways to Enhance the Mobile Buying Experience for Your Customers

How many times a day do you pick up your phone?

According to Zippia, the average American checks their phone 96 times per day or once every 10 to 12 minutes. However, Zippia also reports that we actually touch our phones up to 2,617 times per day and unlock our phones 150 times, on average.

That’s a lot of usage!

Now imagine if just one of those times users bought something from your site.

That’s a lot of sales!

Today’s technology has made some great advances, especially when it comes to a “responsive” web design—or when a website you see on your PC or Mac is sized right and readable on your tablet or phone.

Great. However, there’s a bit more you can do to help your customers have the best mobile experience possible—not only to improve your reputation in the e-commerce space, but to make the buying experience as seamless as possible. Here’s a short list of four pointers.

1.     Test Your Responsive Design

By all means, test your website on various devices on a regular basis. Whether you’re certain your web designer ensures an equally great experience on PCs, Macs, tablets or phones, you’ll want to be sure this holds true. If it’s difficult for a customer to see your good and products on their phone, or hard to navigate the shopping cart, they will neither buy from you nor take the time to buy the product on their computer, especially if they are on the go.

Check with your designer for assistance. If you’re using Shopify, they’ll have lots of help available for you. Mobile optimization involves adjusting image sizes, text spacing, and layouts to provide a visually appealing and user-friendly experience. Google's mobile-friendliness test and PageSpeed Insights can be useful tools to understand your site's mobile performance, while also identifying some areas for improvement.

2.     Simplify Your Navigation

Why complicate the buying experience when you can make it easier to navigate?

The goal is to make it easier for customers to find products and information without too much scrolling and searching. Here are some pointers:

·      Create clear menus and use plain language when possible. Think like your customer instead of using corporate speak.

·      Add a search bar if you do not already have one—and make sure it works.

·      Offer filter options is possible. If you offer a full range of clothing, add check boxes to filter tops, slacks and shoes, for example.

Pro tip: Consider implementing a sticky navigation menu that stays visible as users scroll, offering quick access to essential links. Reducing the number of clicks needed to make a purchase can significantly improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

3.      Speed it up!

Did you know the average amount of time people spend on a webpage is only 53 seconds?

While it will probably take longer for your customers to choose and buy one of your items, there are ways to speed up how your website loads in.

For example, you can compress your images. Instead of including high-res images, consider compressing your images so they have a smaller size. You won’t sacrifice the quality of an image, especially if they are on a phone screen.

You can also leverage browser caching. Essentially, you can specify how long web browsers should keep images. As a result, the user’s browser will download less data while navigating through your pages, improving the loading speed of your website.

Check with your webmaster or web designer for help with these and other ways to increase your speed.

4.     Review Your Mobile Analytics

We ran an blog on how to help increase traffic to your website, but we didn’t cover the analytics discussion. While a lot of e-tailers may dismiss analytics as hocus-pocus, looking at your numbers should help you make better business decisions when it comes to running an e-commerce site.

This is also true for mobile analytics.

You can use analytics’ tools to monitor user behavior on your mobile website by tracking key metrics, including bounce rate, conversion rate, and average session duration. This data will help identify areas for improvement and refine your strategy.

Where to start? Here’s a list of mobile analytics’ tools or you can check, again, with our IT support. Either way, find a way to understand your numbers.

Certum Solutions Can Help

We’re here to help with your e-commerce, accounting and related matters. We work with a wide variety of e-commerce clients who look to us for timely advice and guidance. No solution is cookie-cutter; instead, we listed, assess your needs and provide the best-fit solution for you.

Contact us today and let’s talk.