When it comes to selling your products online, there is a multitude of considerations to make concerning design, development and security for your online store. With most of our world now connected via smartphones, mobile shopping has become a cultural norm. In fact, according to the DMA, 43% of online purchases are made from a smartphone, and it’s likely we’ll continue to see that number rise.
If you’ve found that your company is not seeing a lot of mobile e-commerce sales, it’s time to evaluate your mobile shopping experience. Here are 4 potential reasons that your brand may not be seeing an upswing of mobile sales:
#1 – The product page is confusing to navigate
While responsive design is not a new topic in the digital business era, one of the main reasons that many people choose to leave a site or online store before making a purchase is because the product page was not designed with mobile use at the forefront. Even with high quality and well-loved product, if the product page is hard to navigate on a phone, it’s likely that you’ll lose potential customers just because of the page design.
A mobile first design perspective is critical to creating an online shopping environment that will make purchases extraordinarily intuitive and easy for customers no matter what screen size they’re browsing on. What does mobile first design mean? Here are a few key points to consider:
- Navigation should be simple, concise and straightforward, limited to one or two words
- Calls to action should be easy to tap and within the range of a thumb’s reach
- Results pages or landing pages should be kept simple with a brief product description, price and call to action
#2 – It’s hard to input payment details
Once a customer is on the checkout page, it doesn’t mean they are sold just yet. In fact, if it’s cumbersome to input their payment and billing details from their phone, it’s very possible that they will leave the site altogether. We suggest putting a healthy amount of development time into your checkout page forms. Make sure that the fields people are filling out are easy to land on, easy to input their information into, and easy to go back and edit if need be.
Thankfully, many smartphones have made the mobile checkout process easier with features like credit card scanners and storing contact details for a natural form fill-out, but this does not mean that your company should ignore the design and functionality of this final step in the purchase process. We suggest testing your checkout form on multiple phone models and different browsers with each phone. This way you are sure to catch any instance that could be causing frustration and increasing the likelihood of customers abandoning their online shopping carts.
#3 – Site doesn’t show (very clearly) that it’s secure
As you probably know, having an SSL on your site is now more critical than ever, especially when selling products online. Many browsers now show sites without an SSL as “Not Secure” right at the top by the URL. But even if your website has an SSL, you want to reiterate security throughout the purchase process so that your customers can feel at ease knowing their data and credit card information is going to be safe from any potential security threats.
With all the recent stories in the news of data hacks and security breaches, you can bet that consumers are becoming more conscious about the websites they visit and especially the sites they use to make online purchases.
#4 – It’s hard to compare different product options
Another design element that can put a strain on your mobile sales is when you have multiple product choices, but your customers are not able to easily compare the different products from their mobile screen. Again, this requires a mobile-first design perspective so that no functionality is lost on a smaller screen size. Additionally, you want to consider unique ways to compare your products like side-by-side tables and easy icons to show which features are included with different product choices.
Need help setting up your brand’s products for a mobile-ready shopping experience? As always, be sure to contact our team of web designers and developers to make your vision a reality!