7 Keys to a Winning Mobile eCommerce Store in 2019

Pixabay, CC0 License 2019

Optimising for a seamless e-commerce experience on a mobile or smartphone device is imperative for any business that wants to be successful in today’s market.

Your customers expect to have a positive shopping experience, and if that is not what they find, they will leave and move on to your competitor’s site.

Below are 7 strategies that you can implement to enhance your mobile customers’ shopping experiences.

1. Responsive Web Design

The most critical factor to pay attention to is the design of your website. It must be optimised for every device, from a smartphone, to tablet, to the desktop.

Your website needs to be mobile-responsive so that it looks and engages customers while broswing shopping.

When viewing your site from a smaller mobile screen, you want to make sure your users can quickly see product images and descriptions, search for items, and fill out forms.

The responsive design is different than the desktop design in that it stacks content rather than requiring the user to scroll.

A responsive design means that your site content will look the same on any device, operating system, or browser.

Responsive web pages can detect the orientation and screen size of the user's device so that the layout will change accordingly.

If you want to drive more conversions to your mobile e-Commerce store, be sure that your website is ready to perform on any device.

Some businesses opt to develop a mobile app to enhance the shopper’s experience with features such as a clickable phone number, SMS, or email.

Mofluid is a product that converts Magento e-Commerce shops into a useful mobile app for Android and iPhone. It allows businesses to reach their customers no matter where they are at any time.

2. Hosting Platform and Security

The platform and hosting package you choose for your e-Commerce site will have a significant impact on the success of your business.

One essential element for any online store is an SSL certificate so that your customers’ personal and billing information is protected and secured.

Take time to read up on web hosting services, use unbiased hosting comparison sites that provide web hosting information to educate yourself and help you make the right decisions when choosing a web host company and building a mobile-centric site.

3.  Site Speed

If your site doesn't load quickly, you will lose customers. Did you know that website pages that take more than 3 seconds to load will lose 40% of their potential customers?

What can you do to improve your page speed?

• Test your site speed using Google's mobile speed tool
• Follow Google’s site suggestions for mobile speed improvement
• Optimise your images
• If you on a WordPress platform, use a caching plugin

4. Navigation and User-Flow

Consumers today expect their shopping experience to be smooth, fast, and seamless. Your site's navigation needs to be easy to find, uncluttered and simplified.

You have much less space on a mobile device as compared to a desktop. There isn’t enough room to use menus that list all your businesses’ promotions, categories, and sections.

It’s best to use a single menu icon that opens up when clicked on and displays a drop-down menu. An idea for a clean user-flow is to prominently display an optimised product image on a page that also includes the description.

Put a check out button under the description so that your customers can see all they want or need to look at before making a purchase decision.

5. Allow Guests to Make Purchases

You should always have your customers' experience in mind when designing your e-Commerce store. Everyone's in a hurry and wants to do things as quickly as possible.

Many shoppers don't want to take the time to sign up for an account with your store or even log in. It takes time to fill out fields and go through multiple steps.

When you allow customers to purchase as a guest, you will make their checkout process as painless and quick as possible.

6. Choose Typography Wisely

You don't want your font size to be so small that readers can't read it, but you also don't want it to be too large that it takes up the whole screen.

Make your paragraphs short so that they don't appear on mobile as huge blocks of text. It is suggested that having between 30 and 40 characters on each line will improve readability.

7. Attract and Engage with Visuals

People are attracted to visuals, especially images of people as we are hard-wired to look at other people.

Images also elicit emotions from viewers.

As most purchase decisions are based on feelings, using engaging and compelling visuals will increase your conversion rate.

If a potential customer can see a high-quality image of something they are considering buying, they are more likely to purchase it if they like what they see.

Just don't forget to resize and compress your images so that they don't negatively affect your site load speed.

The bottom line is if you want to have a successful mobile e-Commerce store, you will need to make sure that your customers' shopping experience is pleasant, easy, quick, and seamless.