Enhancing Your Digital Storefront with Mobile Commerce
Some people can’t imagine shopping online with something other than a desktop — it gives you better image size and more screen space to research the products you want to buy. But shopping with your smartphone provides a lot of convenience to shoppers as well. And for that reason, over 32% of consumers prefer to shop with their phones.
That’s why introducing elements of mobile commerce to your digital storefront is so important. Not doing so can result in alienating a third of potential customers and losing sales.
This article will help you explore the steps you need to take to improve mobile commerce on your website.
What is mobile commerce?
Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, is simply ecommerce practices made accessible for mobile devices.
This typically involves making your website easy to interact with on mobile phones and tablets in terms of website performance, such as loading speed and design, making larger buttons, and opting for a more vertical website layout. It can also mean introducing an app specifically for mobile users.
The end goal of mobile commerce practices is to make interaction with your website seamless on mobile devices from the time a user enters your page to the time they go through checkout.
Types of Mobile Commerce
Mobile commerce isn’t limited to purchases at retail websites. There are several types of mobile commerce.
Mobile shopping entails selling and purchasing items on online retail websites or apps. It’s also what we’re going to focus on in this article.
Mobile banking is a fintech solution that allows mobile users to access their bank account via a mobile app or a website of their bank. This form of banking is convenient to the end user and has built-in security features. The downside is that it could pose a security risk when handled by the user without care.
Mobile payment is a set of fintech solutions that make it easy to pay for goods or services online and it requires a phone to handle the transaction. The most common solutions include mobile banking with your bank, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and PayPal.
Mobile Commerce vs. eCommerce
If we’re talking about mobile commerce in general, this term includes a lot more than what eCommerce entails, like mobile banking and mobile payment systems. However, if we’re looking specifically at mobile shopping, it’s essentially one element of eCommerce.
Mobile commerce is a form of eCommerce carried out with mobile devices. This includes browsing eCommerce websites and apps in terms of making payments and tracking deliveries.
Key Components of Mobile Commerce Optimization
Now that you have a better understanding of what mobile commerce is, let’s explore ways to implement it in your digital storefront.
Optimizing for mobile user experience
The most useful part of mobile commerce strategy is to optimize your website for user experience on mobile platforms. Navigating your website to find the right products or services is the first thing a new user is going to do. If they aren’t satisfied with the experience, they might simply leave to find another vendor.
That said, it might not be the easiest task as it can require redesigning large portions of your site and changing hundreds of pages. The upside is that if you create a seamless experience, 74% of customers are likely to return.
How do you go about optimizing mobile UX? You start with an analysis.
A specialized tool like SE Ranking’s site audit can crawl your website and create a comprehensive report on any technical problems it might have, on desktop and mobile platforms.
Source: SE Ranking
Alt: SE Ranking website audit shows website health score.
It also pinpoints the exact problems your platform runs into, like mobile accessibility issues or loading speed concerns, and provides suggestions on how to improve them.
Source: SE Ranking
Source: SE Ranking website audit shows areas for improvement.
There are some best practices that can help you stay on the safe side, and avoid experimenting with mobile design. The following are applicable to both websites and apps.
- Hide large video files on mobile platforms to prioritize loading speed.
- Make sure JavaScript and CSS animations work as intended on multiple mobile platforms.
- Set up automatic adjustment of fonts and images to screen size.
- Avoid using pop-ups, or at least reduce the number of pop-ups you use. If you do use them, make the close button big and easy to click with a thumb.
- Design links and buttons so that users can’t misclick on them with their thumbs.
- Collapse the navigation menu and give more screen space to the search bar.
Look through your website on several mobile platforms and judge whether it follows these best practices. You can use various devices or Google Chrome’s Inspect tool. It lets you set up the screen dimensions of the most popular mobile devices.
Source: Medium
Alt: The Google Chrome Inspect tool lets you set the dimensions of popular mobile devices.
If you find any problematic areas, you can either go ahead and implement changes right away or run an A/B test with those changes by serving users different versions of the site. Take the option that performs best and use it in your mobile commerce strategy.
Implement quick search and personalized suggestions
Mobile users value speed and efficiency in their interactions with websites. That’s why you should make searching for and discovering products on your website easy.
The first part of this process is optimizing search on your mobile eCommerce website. The primary thing here is to make the search bar or search icon easy to access.
Let’s take Adidas as one of the best mobile commerce examples.
Source: Adidas
Alt: A mobile website has the search icon in an accessible place.
Even though the navigation bar is a bit cluttered, the search icon is clearly visible and fixed to the top of the page.
Another thing you should do to facilitate search is implement autofill. This helps save typing time and boosts product discovery.
Source: Adidas
Alt: A mobile eCommerce website gives search prompts.
Apart from helping users search for what they need on your platform, you should also help them discover relevant products. The easiest way to do this is by suggesting products to customers based on similarity or personal preference.
Source: Adidas
Alt: Mobile eCommerce website shows product suggestions.
If the customer is logged in, you can serve suggestions based on their previous eCommerce purchases. If not, just suggest products that are either similar to the ones being viewed or that make sense to buy together.
Introduce different payment options
Since ease of use and versatility are what matters in mobile commerce, you should consider following these principles in one of the most important areas of digital storefronts — payment and checkouts.
Include as many different payment options as possible. The most popular ones include:
- Apple Pay
- Google Pay
- PayPal
- Banking apps
- Wallets
- NFC payments
- Mobile carrier billing
Apart from providing multiple payment options, you should also streamline the checkout process.
Ideally, you should avoid giving users unnecessary steps to go through to make a purchase and break down those steps into separate screens. This makes it more efficient to finish checkout on a mobile device.
Keep content concise
Storytelling on mobile eCommerce websites can be a valid choice, but when mobile optimization is the goal, it’s best to keep content on the shorter side. The key component of good mobile commerce optimization is how fast a user can understand the most important information about your product.
A large part of it is using high-quality images. When text is involved, the easiest way to make it comfortable for the user is to keep the description as short as possible and use bullet points for most of the text.
Source: Puma
Alt: Product description on mobile is short and informative.
In this example, Puma only uses three sentences to tell a story about the product and then follows up with three bullet point sections to convey the key information faster.
Use push notifications wisely
Mobile commerce doesn’t just provide users with a convenient way to shop, it also creates another opportunity for businesses to communicate with customers. You can use push notifications from either a browser or an app if you have one.
The most important use of push notifications is re-engaging users. Cart abandonment is at 79% on average, and using every way to remind users about their unfinished purchases can increase mobile sales.
A special type of push notification that is only available on mobile platforms is location-based or geofencing. This notification is only sent when a customer is near your physical store location, reminding them about the possibility of shopping with you or offering a discount.
Shipping notifications can be a simple and effective way to stay in touch with your customers during shipping, ensuring high customer satisfaction and avoiding unnecessary load on your customer care team.
In addition, you can use push notifications to send users promotions or personal product recommendations. The most important thing here is to be careful not to send them too often and to only send them if a user opts in for them.
Monitor performance and adapt
Lastly, to ensure the continuing success of your mobile marketing efforts, you have to monitor how well it performs and make any necessary changes.
To understand how effective your mobile marketing is, track the metrics that you would typically track to gauge eCommerce performance:
- Sales volume
- Average purchase size
- Conversion rate
- Time on page
- Bounce rate
- Return rate
When you measure these, filter by the device to get only results from mobile users.
If you see that these metrics aren’t changing positively over time, go back to the drawing board and try to find where your mobile commerce strategy might have failed.
Gather feedback from both the users and your sales and marketing team to find more insights on this.
Mobile Commerce Trends for 2024
Making your website accessible to mobile users and adding mobile-friendly payment methods is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to optimizing for mobile. There are four major trends that you should consider looking into.
Generative AI is probably the most important one to consider using in your eCommerce business. It can reduce the resources needed to produce product descriptions in large volumes, take your existing product descriptions, and make them mobile-friendly by summarizing them. This text, for instance, is flagged as AI-generated, and the page is doing fine in search.
Source: Zippos
Alt: AI-generated product description text.
This can potentially save you thousands of dollars on writing and rewriting — you just need to experiment until you find a prompt that works for you, and then you can generate hundreds of texts.
AI is also another major part of the mobile commerce trend — mobile chatbots. The larger trend of eCommerce customer experience is to give users more freedom in how they discover and buy products. A chatbot, whether it’s in your app, site, or messenger, can present your products in an interactive way and also handle transactions.
A trend that is harder to implement but exclusive to mobile platforms is AR. Augmented reality technology can help your customers visualize your products through the lens of their phone, whether it’s a decorative lamp or a pair of sunglasses. It’s great at reducing the uncertainty of buying something online.
The easiest way to do this is to include a 360 view of your product in Google Marketplace.
Source: Google
Alt: 360 view available on Google Shopping.
Voice search has been around for quite a while now, but it doesn’t get enough attention from the eCommerce industry yet. According to mobile commerce statistics, half of US consumers use voice search daily, and accommodating for that can increase your website traffic and sales.
Summary
As there are more mobile phones than people worldwide, mobile commerce is guaranteed to stay relevant for decades to come. Implementing the most basic m-commerce practices doesn’t take a lot of work, and it can increase sales since your website will be welcoming a new demographic — people who prefer to shop with their phones.
Use the tips from this article to make your digital storefront useful to people today, and look into the trends to make it future-proof.
Author’s bio:
Kateryna Boiko is a dedicated content manager at SE Ranking, a company that developed intuitive software for SEO pros. With faith in high-quality, helpful content, she shares marketing insights in blog articles about eCommerce, tech, and SEO. In her leisure time, Kateryna reads contemporary fiction books or learns languages.
