Do you know?
There are 272.6 million smartphone users in America and an average screen time of 5.4 hours is spent daily on their smartphone. That means your eCommerce business has these 5.4 hours to interact with your customers. Definitely, you don’t want to lose this opportunity for your business.
You have been involved in various methods like optimizing the search engines, content marketing, high-quality images, product videos, and many more to make your online presence the strongest in the eCommerce market. But to dominate the eCommerce vertical, you need to leverage the benefits of mCommerce and steal the limelight towards you.
2021 is forecasted to be the year where mCommerce will be dominating the retail sales by surpassing eCommerce with 54% of the total eCommerce market share.
Since your ultimate aim is to boost sales, and the purchasing power is in the hands of your customers, your full focus should be on improving the customers’ mobile commerce experience and how can you make it more captivating, simplified, accessible, and enjoyable for them.
Is your eCommerce website mobile-friendly?
The stats mentioned earlier must have been able to give you a clear view of how the mCommerce strategy will be the turning point of your Magento stores. So, what do you think? Is your Magento platform mCommerce friendly?
You can partner with a Top Magento Development Company for achieving your mCommerce goals as well for your Magento stores.
The best way to find out the user experience of your e-store on mobile is to use tools like Applause, Appsee, Swrve, Loop11, Sigos, Apperian, and many more. You can also use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to get a clear picture of how your mobile page is working and how the user is engaged with your e-store on mobile.
These tools will help you to analyze:
- Image and Video Loading time
- Text Visibility
- Page Loading Speed
- Clickability
- Use of Pop-Ups
- UI/UX
So, how are you planning to tap the benefits of mCommerce for your Magento stores? Let’s look at the tips to optimize mCommerce to boost sales.
1. The “Wow” factor- Mobile Website Design
Ideal website design is where the users can easily locate what they are looking for. A mobile commerce platform can’t be the same as that of a desktop homepage as a part of the design is either cut off or doesn’t load properly or certain elements aren’t visible and clickable when you visit your website on mobile or tablets. Therefore, responsive, mobile-friendly design is required to overcome these challenges.
As a Magento store owner, you should be well aware of the mobile-first indexing strategy where Google primarily uses the mobile version of the webpage for ranking.
The best practices that you need to follow for both desktop and mobile versions are:
- The data should be structured
- SEO-based title tags, meta descriptions, and other metadata.
- Canonical tags should be perfect
- Make sure that the Googlebot can access your pages.
The advantage of using the Magento Commerce platform for your eCommerce store is its built-in features and support for numerous extensions to simplify the process. If your eCommerce store is running on any other open-source platform, then hiring a mobile web designer will be suitable so that you can experiment on all the latest mobile UX design trends.
Pro-Tip: Make call-to-action dominant on the screen. The menus should be readable and precise. The promo content should be minimal. Your mobile website should be navigation friendly.
2. User-friendly and Simplified Navigation
You are new to the city and searching for a garage nearby. The garage is nearly 10 minutes from your current location, but confusing directions took 40 minutes to take you to the destination. Won’t you feel frustrated?
Imagine the visitors on your website who are trying to find their way on the mobile commerce platform. How would they feel if you aren’t able to provide them easily with what they are looking for? Therefore, it becomes easy to delight your customers. Though you can’t provide all tabs and pages like the desktop website, you can make your important pages on the website easily searchable, accessible, and clickable.
Pro-Tip: Mend the broken links. The important aspects like the main menu, pages, links, posts, etc., should be easy to locate, access, and click. Concentrating on these factors will help you to get more conversions.
3. The mobile commerce website should be loaded at lightning speed
The most annoying thing for a customer and the biggest hurdle in conversion is a slow website. More than 47% of mobile users expect the page to load within 2 seconds or less. You may add thousands of eye-catching features to your websites, but if the loading speed is very slow, the user won’t give a second thought to abandon your website and go elsewhere. Just think about the loss you had!
To increase the speed of your website you need to optimize the images, use minimal content, use a caching plugin, flat design approach, and convert the pages into AMP format to ensure the mobile website is fast, consistent, beautiful, and high-performing across all the devices and platforms.
Pro-Tip: The page should be loaded within 2 seconds or less. You can try by eliminating unnecessary images, avoiding embedded media files, avoiding complex visuals, and reducing on-page assets. Frequently check the speed of your website on GTmetrix, Pingdom Tools, and others.
4. Seamless Checkout Process
Your ultimate aim is to make your customers make a purchase on your online store. A customer when adding a product to the cart is likely to buy the product or at least intends to. But a complicated checkout process that isn’t optimized for mobile can make the user abandon the shopping cart.
A complex checkout process includes:
- Broken or unresponsive checkout page
- Long and tiring process
To combat this situation, consider a mobile-first strategy to adopt the following practices:
- The check-out process should be winded up with 4-5 steps.
- The checkout form should consist of a minimum number of fields.
- Design buttons should be bold and visible enough.
Pro-Tip: To make the checkout process faster and intuitive try to keep the checkout process simple by reducing the efforts of the mobile user to fill the details and restricting the entire process to a maximum of 5 steps.
5. Avoid Unnecessary Distractive Pop-ups and Ads
The difference between the mobile eCommerce platform and the desktop web page is about the space available. A desktop web page usually can be experimented with landing page offers and ads due to space available. But, this isn’t the case with mobile, and therefore unwanted popups and ads will likely distract the users resulting in dropping off the site.
Also, Google crawlers track down bad user-experience to bring down the ranking for mobile impressions and there are fewer chances to rank your site in search results.
Pro-tip: Use push notifications or targeted emails across the network and spare your m-commerce application from unnecessary distraction.
In a nutshell
Since mobile plays a pivotal role in our lives and has gained importance for major activities, conversion over mobile has increased. With the rise in cutting-edge technologies, the users are provided a personalized experience irrespective of their location and boundaries. They are familiar with all the functions and features that help them to explore products and brands online from any corner. Therefore, it becomes essential to optimize your online store for a mobile-friendly experience. This gives you an opportunity to leverage the benefits of mobile SEO and attract more traffic to your website.
With mCommerce, you can get ahead of the game in the eCommerce market by making your website optimized with the tips mentioned in the article.
Guest article written by: Jeevan Babu is a technology enthusiast and strong believer in agile product development. He is a Senior Project Manager at Fortunesoft IT Innovations a leading custom software development company. A Computer Engineer by education and a technology adherent by passion. His interest in computers & the internet has made him a self-proclaimed geek.
Nice aricle. Get to learn alot. Thanks for sharing.