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Website and sales traffic is forecasting a serious upsurge coming from mobile devices. In fact projections regarding the trend made in 2008, have more than matched the numbers in 2014. Is your mobile website prepared to handle this type of traffic? Is your phone number easily accessible with one click? How many pages are in between the customer’s desired product and the final sale click?
You may want to take a quick look at your mobile website and make sure that it is set up to be a smooth and efficient process for mobile customers. If your mobile site is not, then it could end of costing you thousands or even millions in sales, because research is showing that 35% of online shoppers do not continue to a desktop to finalize their purchase. That means if your website was not easy to manage for them, then you likely lost that sale.
There are several aspects of your mobile website that you are going to want to make sure are set up specifically to aide and assist your visitors in their shopping experience. You will need to optimize your filters, provide a visible click-to-call button, remove pop-up banners, and limit the number of images.
When it comes to online product, it can get quite difficult to manage filters in a timely manner. Usually the more product provided on the site, the more filters are available to sort the product. Most often the customer should get to their desired item within four clicks or even less. You will want to minimize the way in which you communicate information about the product which you can do by using icons instead of wording.
You absolutely must provide a visible click-to-call button, as many as 61% of people feel it is important to call the business some time during the purchasing process. If they cannot easily dial you, you are at risk of losing those potential sales.
Due to limited screen space, the mobile media world has to make accommodations, one of those very important accommodations is to remove pop-ads and banners. It is an interruption for the buyer who is focused on getting to the checkout, this interruption could lead to deterring the customer from completing the sale, as it has now become time consuming and confusing. The mobile buying experience should be as smooth and quick as possible.
Again, the screen space available to these mobile buyers is hugely limited; therefore, you are going to need to reduce as much verbiage and images as possible to keep the experience and process super easy for the online buyer. You will even want to consider the spacing of your mobile site, you do not want any of your buttons and products to be difficult to access.
The main point of mobile buyers is to find their desired product quickly and to pay for the item quickly. The whole process should be more of a quick (almost impulsive) convenience, as opposed to an afternoon browsing store websites for potential purchases. Most often, mobile buyers are interested in making the purchase without needing to browse. This means you will want to make sure that the process for purchasing on their mobile device is quick and convenient.
One area in which you can cut back is to include as much as you can in a one stop page. Often times, shipping will be handled on a subsequent page. This can be come time consuming and could also potentially deter the buyer. By compacting the information and gathering the bare minimum of what you need from them, will allow them to click the “place order” button quicker and even more frequently.
You will want to take a look at providing things like one click buying for return customers and using certain plugins that can allow you to help the customer input information into fields more quickly. You can take a look at the Google Maps plugin, it is designed to assist customers with address input fields.
Additionally, for those of you using PayPal, you may want to consider using a service comparable to Amazon Payments, which never takes the customer away from your site. Their pricing is competitive and they do provide a one click checkout process. Making sure your mobile site checkout process is streamlined is certain to help you avoid abandoned shopping carts.
With statistics pointing to 65% of shoppers who start out on smartphones eventually continuing their shopping activity on a desktop, you will want to provide a service that will allow the shopper to continue, without losing the items in their cart.
The importance of this option is to, again, make it effortless and convenient for those mobile shoppers. For example, people on their lunch breaks often step away from their desktops; however, they have their phone in their hand. They can shop while on their lunch break and your mobile site can offer them a convenient way to save their cart and have it emailed to them for later use, as well as for use on another device.
The most important aspect to your mobile website, should be that it is smooth and easy for your customers to use. When you are looking at your online sales and check out process, consider the time it takes, the amount of clicks, and the ease of the process. The easier it is the more likely you will get the sale, as well as the customer will return.
When it comes to what most of us know about advertising and sales, these tips may seem counter-intuitive. But what you must remember is that the process of mobile buying has its own algorithms. You will want to pay attention to these trends in order to best facilitate your customers in making purchases on your mobile site, over and over again.
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