6 Steps for Making Your Online Store Mobile-Friendly in Presentation

6 Steps for Making Your Online Store Mobile-Friendly in Presentation Users may not know exactly what goes into making an online store mobile-friendly, but they sure as Hell know when their online shopping experience isn’t optimized for mobile.

A recent report by Statista reveals that in 2019, the number of smartphone users has passed the 2.5 billion mark.

In 2020 this numbers will rise to more than 2.9 billion smartphone users across the world.

Take a quick look at the graph below:

Image credits: statista

People are more likely to use smartphones and tablets as compared to desktop devices. More than 94% of the people in USA search for local information on their smartphones. 77% of these searches are made at home or at the workplace (places where you would commonly find desktop computers). This is why optimizing your websites and eCommerce stores is becoming very important.

So how exactly can you optimize your websites to be more mobile friendly?

A few years back, developers used to make entirely different websites for mobile devices. This would increase the development cost and would take double the development time. Thanks to mobile app development, now you can make your online store more mobile friendly and responsive.

Why Is It Important to Make your online store Mobile-friendly?

Before we move on, let’s take a moment to understand ‘why a mobile-friendly and responsive web design’ is important for the success of your online store.

If your website isn’t mobile friendly, it will take a long time to load and a user might abandon your site within the first few seconds. If a user has a hard time viewing all the elements of your website and they have to pinch or zoom to read the content, this will make navigating your site a wild goose chase. Going from one page to another, constantly having to zoom in and zoom out will be an extremely frustrating experience. An online store that is responsive and mobile-friendly is more readable and immediately usable.

6 Steps for Making Your eCommerce Store Presentation More Mobile-Friendly 1. Clear Layout and Simple Website Navigation

Once in a while you always end up opening an older website on your smartphone.

We have to scroll up and down, right and left, and it’s almost impossible to find the right buttons. If your online site, looks and functions like one of those older websites, not only will you get fewer visitors, Google will also punish you by lowering your website ranking. You need to configure the layout of your eCommerce store so that it’s easy to navigate and mobile-friendly. Your site’s navigation must be a piece of cake, if users visit an of your sub-pages, customers must understand how to go back to the home page.

The large menus and long lists of categories of products will not work for mobile devices. Because a mobile screen is much smaller than a computer screen, you will have to shorten your lists and condense your navigational menus. The best way to do this is by displaying a single drop-down menu throughout your website. So when a user hits the menu icon, it opens to reveal your product categories and various interfaces without any hassle.

2. A Clear and Specific CTA

After you think that you’ve created a mobile responsive online store, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your website able to convert your visitors into potential customers?
• Is your website clear & concise and does it show clear CTA (call-to-action)?

If not then you should probably go back and re-assess the CTA of your eCommerce store, remember, you want to deliver a flawless user experience. If you want to boost sales and revenue, you’re going to have to put yourself in your visitor’s shoes.

To improve user engagement and boost revenue, your site must have clear and visible ‘call-to-action’. Your ‘Add-to-Cart’, ‘Buy’, and ‘Menu’ buttons must be prominent and understandable.

We’ve rounded up some tips to help you effectively design your store’s CTA, have a look below:

• Make your CTA bold and easy to read
• Use the right amount of whitespace to make your CTA more prominent
• Use clear and actionable language, make the content easy to read
• Use attractive yet aesthetic color for your CTA
• Decide on the right placement of your CTA to avoid any confusion

3. Design Fast Loading Pages

A survey held by ‘Kissmetrics’ reveals that if an e-commerce site earns $100,000 per day, one-second page delay could cause them to lose over $2.5 million in sales every year.

One second delay in the page load time to reduce conversions by a striking 7%.

You can see the importance of optimizing your site to load flawlessly on mobile devices. Pass your site through a speed test, if you see any delay in loading time, you will have to start making some changes.

Image credits: freepik

The first thing to remember is that ‘too much content’ can cause page delay (you shouldn’t be overloading your page with content in the first place, no one has the time to read everything). Make sure that the content you choose is properly placed, is concise, and informative. If you’re using animations or videos, reduce their size, video streaming can slow the page down and consume the mobile bandwidth.

Follow these tips to help you speed up the e-commerce store and make it more mobile-friendly:

• Compress and reduce images and graphics
• Eliminate any 301 redirects
• Optimize all CSS and JS files
• Make sure that you load above the fold content first
• Optimize the server response time

4. Offer an Omnichannel User-Experience

In simple words, an Omnichannel shopping experience is a unified experience. This means that if a user left off an activity on one channel, they could easily continue doing it on a different channel. For example, if a user gets an email about a discount code, and they decide to place their items in the shopping cart on a computer. They could continue to the checkout step on their smartphone. So your website should be in sync with all the popular social media channels, web, emails, in-store, etc. You must be able to engage your customers on many channels, and collect information to provide personalized and real-time user experience across multiple devices and locations.

An Omnichannel Customer experience creates:

• Loyal Customers that come back for more
• Streamlined customer service
• Increase in revenue and improved business performance
• Personalized user interactions at every touchpoint

5. Put A Stop to Flash and Pop-Ups

When users visit your site on their mobile devices, the last thing they want to see is a message that tells them to ‘Install Flash to view content’. Mobile devices do not support Flash. These type of errors can be detected by Googlebot and as a result, your website ranking is affected. This can cost you some potential customers and website visitors. Instead of flash, you can go for HTML5 and JavaScript which are more reliable.

Image credits: freepik

We’ve all hit those websites that bombard us with multiple advertisements and useless pop-ups. These pop-ups are plain annoying, especially if they cover important website content. Again, if Google notices that you’re sending out content that lowers the user experience, you may be penalized. Think about it, if you are busy browsing through a website, and suddenly an advertisement pop-ups and you accidentally click it, the pop-up will redirect you to an entirely different website that you had no intention of visiting. This type of interstitial content can interrupt your browsing and basically cause immense annoyance.

6. Start Creating Your eCommerce Mobile Apps

Mobile apps have become very popular; you can find a mobile app for all types of tasks. Workout, content management, employee attendance, photo editing, diet planning, and so much more. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all social media channels have their mobile apps. Thanks to mobile application development companies, now you can easily own a mobile app for your e-commerce stores. For example Aliexpress, Amazon, and Star 360. Studies show that over 60% of users prefer to use mobile apps over websites. Businesses have to be where their audience is, and it appears that customers want their favorite brands on their fingertips. This means that it has become important for e-commerce stores to have their mobile apps for mobile-friendly user experience.

Here are some benefits of having your e-commerce mobile app:

• Increase in customer engagement
• Less cart abandonment
• Increase in conversions
• Customers can be re-engaged
• Personalized content and push notifications
• Instant Usage

Conclusion

In order to succeed in the e-commerce market, you will have to follow the trends and make sure that you are doing everything to improve the user experience for your visitors. Because of the increasing competition in the e-commerce world, attracting and retaining consumers is becoming very difficult. If you’ve read up to hear, we hope that you found our tips valuable. The above-mentioned guidelines will help you develop a mobile-friendly online store that increases your customers and boost your sales. If you’d like to share an experience or if you’d like to add something, feel free to leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you.

The post 6 Steps for Making Your Online Store Mobile-Friendly in Presentation appeared first on Graphic Web Design & Brand Marketing Company Medford OR.

by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company