Preparing for the 2019 Festive Season: Optimising for Mobile

In the 2018 festive season, orders placed on a mobile device outnumbered online orders for the first time in history. The popularity of mobile shopping is still increasing and it is expected that by 2021 approximately 75% of all online orders will be placed on a mobile device. If your site isn’t yet optimised for mobile, or if your existing optimisation could be improved on, there is no better time to look in to getting this sorted. Is it easy and intuitive to make purchases on your store through a mobile device? Is the site mobile responsive? Make sure that you are continuously testing how your store looks on a mobile device as both your content and general technology changes.

The most obvious thing that you should bear in mind when designing your site for mobile is the way it’s operated. You should be able to navigate the site using just your thumb or index finger. If users have to scroll sideways around the site or pinch to zoom in, it’s not optimised for mobile.

Make sure that the content that is seen on a mobile device is short, eyecatching and uncluttered. It goes without saying that the screen on a mobile is smaller than that of a PC. If you add long product descriptions or too many images, it’s all going to take away from the simplicity of the site, lead to clutter and frustration for your users and if bad enough, they will click off and go head somewhere else where their purchase will be simpler. Make sure you’re only providing essential content.

Another way to boost your sales amongst mobile users is to enable your store to accept guest checkouts. Nothing turns off a mobile user more than having to fill out lengthy forms for registration details, and click back and forth on email verification emails. Mobile shopping should be quick and simple and people will very quickly lose patience if they have to complete a large amount of steps to complete their purchase. If you allow guest checkout, your customers can complete their purchases by just giving the minimal information necessary, and you can always ask them if they would like to register once their purchase is completed.

Just because there’s a need to keep your product pages simple it doesn’t mean you can’t use them for cross-selling. It is very popular amongst online stores to add a “customers who bought this also bought…” section either on the product page or on the checkout page when the customer has clicked through to buy the item. This can be very effective as it can be quickly added as a last minute purchase, it’s akin to the product shelves that line the queueing sections at the tills of a physical store. The difference, and therefore the advantage, of doing this on the mobile store is that you can tailor those products exactly to match the other products that the customer has added to their cart. For example, if the customer has added wrapping paper and sticky tape to their cart, the products they see might be gift ribbons, bows or nametags.

Make sure it’s easy for the customer to contact you if they need to. Mobile shoppers want problems sorted quickly and so if they need to contact you, they don’t want to be rooting around in your site for the way in which to do so. Make sure your phone number is easily visible on your page, and consider installing a mobile friendly chat client to your site so that customers can get assistance with their purchase there and then.

Never use pop ups on a mobile site if you can avoid it. They’re annoying at best and at worst can actually obstruct your customer from making the purchase they were intending to make. If a barrier arises on your site to stop them completing their purchase, they will just go elsewhere.