Improving your eCommerce on mobile devices is a real necessity for any company starting an online business. It’s a new way to present your online store on personal handheld devices with a tiny, touch-based, versatile screen.
Of course, TLG Commerce’s Marketing Department will be happy to assess your eCommerce and present the best practices to get your online store properly up and running right away.
But let’s get to the main point!
What influences mobile user behavior?
Our potential customer, from now on the “Smart Buyer,” is a savvy person who easily compares websites and buys what they want at the price they want. But they hate reading and waiting: they want an easy purchase!
Our job is to grab their attention, spark their interest, trigger the desire to buy and prompt action ~ kchink! ~
How can we attract Smart Buyers?
We need to consider the following points:
- Accessibility
- User experience
- Website speed
- Web content
The same points apply to desktop users, but on smartphones they play a more dynamic role. Read on to find out!
Building the ideal structure for my Smart Buyer
Helping the Smart Buyer find my products
Let’s start with accessibility, defined as the ability to reach a web page and grasp the information as practically and quickly as possible. We need to consider:
- Rich content
- Overlapping banners (interstitials)
- Website navigation
This type of content delivers an advanced experience to the user through video or sound, aiming to capture their attention and increase (especially video) average session duration.
A practice you should NOT do is overlay interstitial banners (a type of rich media that floats over content): these banners can lead to a severe penalty and a big loss of organic traffic to your site.
Above all, make your eCommerce easy to use, including menu items and category dropdowns or fans.
Making things easy for my Smart Buyer
That’s it: improving their user experience will make them come back. But we need to address the following concepts if we want to help them find what they’re looking for:
- Scaling
- Text size
- “Clickable” elements
- Gestures
- Site search
- Keyboard and typing
- Conversion-friendly
Scaling helps fit your content size to the different smartphone screen formats. A good practice is to upload images in responsive formats with the right pixel resolution so they don’t lose quality (pixelation) when adapted to various formats.
Text size determines how easily visitors can read; ideally, set a base font size of 16 pixels and let it scale relative to the user’s mobile device.
The “clickable” elements users can interact with are VERY important in an eCommerce store. It’s always recommended to make these actionable elements at least 48 pixels wide and set a minimum spacing of 32 pixels from other elements on the site.
Mobile users navigate your online store with a single finger, so you need to decide how they’ll interact with the store’s elements. The most common gestures are pinching and double-tapping to zoom; remember that “zoom” must be enabled for these actions to work.
On-site search must be intuitive to properly process the information users want. One practice we use is collecting visitors’ search terms to decide what to highlight in the store and how to shape the digital advertising plan.
The different fields where users enter information should behave differently. For example, when a user fills in the email field of their customer profile, show a simplified keyboard with special characters such as the at sign (@); for their name, a standard keyboard; and for their postal code, a numeric keypad.
The goal is for users to complete their customer profile the first time they visit that section: an abandonment means more than just a lost conversion!
The data we’ve gathered from Smart Buyers shows that every process involving a form, a call or a purchase should be simplified into a single step.
“That rule is over: take more than 3 clicks to complete payment!”
Smart Buyer
Fast page loading increases conversions
Keeping server response times below 200 ms and reducing DOM (Document Object Model) load is the ideal scenario for maximizing sales performance on your eCommerce store.
You should design your online store for a 3G connection if you want to sell outside Europe. Most users in 2020 will come from developing countries and will represent a business opportunity for many sectors.
Your content must be explosive and seamless!
Online users are impulsive and dynamic; we must offer the right content, simplified as much as possible, so it doesn’t become a barrier when browsing the online store.
Make your eCommerce a professional, polished showcase that’s easy to interact with!
Think the mobile transformation ends here?
This is only the beginning: search engines are starting to gather information from the mobile versions of eCommerce sites, and changes are expected throughout 2017 and early 2018.
Now that you know the main factors to consider for a mobile-focused website, it’s the perfect time to get advice from the professionals at TLG Commerce.
Share your digital commerce experience with us and we’ll help you!
