It seems everyone has a smartphone or a tablet these days, and they
are being used for more and more of our daily computing tasks.
M-commerce sales have more or less doubled since this time last year,
and makes up a substantial portion of total online sales. The experts
all agree that e-commerce over mobile devices will continue to take up a
larger and larger share of the market, though there is spirited
disagreement about the predicted rates of growth.
This means that many of your website visitors are already viewing it
on a three to seven inch screen, whether your site can recognise and
adapt to this fact or not. If you aren’t providing a good user
experience for such a large segment of your visitors, is it surprising
that they are turning to competitors who are?
So, what can you do to improve mobile user experience for your e-commerce customers?
Compatibility
Having a responsive web design that can detect the device type and operating system of your visitors is crucial. As an experiment, take out your smartphone, and navigate to your website right now. What does it look like? Can you see anything at all? The edge of your top banner? Or everything, but too small to have any hope of reading? If you can see it, how easy is it to use without a mouse? Without a keyboard?Mobile customers should be automatically (and quickly) redirected to a version of your site optimised for a very small screen, and limited input options. This may require a major site redesign, but your web designer or fulfilment partner should be able to advise you. Alternatively, if you feel up to handling your own site many major template-based CMSs have mobile friendly templates and detection features.
Making sure your site can recognise and resize to fit your user’s device is the first and most obvious step, but that is not enough.
Trust
More than 40% of m-commerce customers report that they worry about order security. M-commerce is relatively new, and your customers have the same trust issues that early e-commerce customers had, and they can be dealt with in much the same way.Assure your mobile customers that your order process is encrypted and secure. More importantly, seek out, earn, and display any relevant trustmarks prominently. Make sure they appear both on your home/landing page, and throughout your entire checkout process.
M-commerce seems to be on its way from being a curiosity to becoming the new norm. It certainly isn’t some fad. Make sure you adapt to it early.
