planning / 5 simple ways to improve your mobile ecommerce experience

5 simple ways to improve your mobile ecommerce experience

Andy Thorne
graphic illustration of mobile phone and piles of coins with the number 5

You have less than a second to grab the attention of customers using phones to make purchases. Then, poor performance means 88% of them won’t bother coming back. How can you design your mobile eCommerce ux website to offer the best shopper experience?

Your customers are increasingly using their phone to buy products; but are they buying from you or from your competitors?

Having a responsive website design, optimised across all devices, is now about business survival as well as profitable growth. Failure could leave 63% of your potential customers ‘ticked off’ and tapping away! That’s the current percentage of people going online to shop via their phones, but it’s a figure with an upwards trajectory.

Put that another way. There were already 1.2 billion people shopping online using their mobile phones. Then came the Coronavirus pandemic, with immeasurably more people turning to eCommerce. What is likely to be their favoured device for this? Their ever-present phones of course.

Did you know, there’s even an official name for the fear of not having your mobile phone nearby? It’s called nomophobia.

Pampering to the nation’s relationship with their mobile phone is the only way you can be sure that your website offers strong user experience (UX) and opportunities for buoyant sales.

Here are five easy ways to improve UX on mobile eCommerce websites.

1 – Clear and easy navigation

Mobile Ecommerce UX

To ensure easy navigation, your site must be optimised for mobile usage. Navigation should be an easy process for your customers.

It’s shocking how many online retailers assume a well laid out desktop website transitions effortlessly into supporting good mobile eCommerce ux when it comes to looking at sales.

There are still hideously ‘clunky’ examples we could name and shame. Have you visited one of these websites recently, where you find yourself altering the viewing size or perspective, to try to get a visual handle on it? Or, you need to squint to find the right tab or button to progress through the pages and find what you need.

Consumers ‘on the go’ want to interact effortlessly with their smartphone. They demand websites that are intelligent in their layout and navigation.

2 – Hierarchy of product information

Mobile Ecommerce ux, Mobile Heirachy

To increase the ease of finding products on a page or search ensure your product information is ordered in the correct hierarchy.

This tip for strong UX for online retailers links to the above one. Your brand identity must be cut sharp and clear for viewing on a mobile phone. You also need to display product information in a logical and effortlessly searchable manner.

What is product hierarchy in website design? It’s the process of classifying items by their basic components, to increase the ease of finding them on a page or search. It hinges on working out the right categories, themes and brand statements.

For example: MangoJam Clothes – women’s clothes – summer dresses – strapless – floral.

3 – Footer: a vital component of ecommerce mobile sites

Mobile Footer

Top tip to increase Click Through Rate, ensure your footer includes all relevant information users may require.

The best footers on eCommerce websites are optimised to be minimal, while still being a valuable navigation tool or call to action holder. Scanning down the page, website users can quickly click through to call you, complete the transaction, register, check your social media or complete some other core process.

Put simply, if they need to search around for a button, tab or form, the chances are they won’t! If it’s clearly visible in the page footer, click-throughs increase dramatically.

4 – Load time/speed

Load Time

Successful mobile ecommerce sites must first achieve the basics such as load time.

This is another basic requirement of eCommerce websites for smartphones. If loading your page, pulling up information or actioning a response takes too long, then one ‘tap’ and they’ve gone!

It accounts for considerable numbers of abandoned shopping carts when content-heavy or complex payment systems take an age to load on a phone screen.

5 – Simple form fields and product descriptions

Simple Form Fields

When it comes to reducing form fields, consider what information is essential, do you require DOB for an ecommerce site?

As we often say, less can be more. As long as your mobile eCommerce ux is strong and effective enough. By this, we mean having the core elements of your pages stripped back to what works best, with no flowery or superfluous extras.

Using a mobile phone to go online and make a purchase is about convenience and saving time. Consumers want to go straight to clear product descriptions, then seamlessly onwards to a form or transactional page.

What’s one of the biggest disasters of mobile eCommerce user experience? Filling in fields on a form that’s complex or hard to see. Or, completing information only for it to inexplicably disappear leaving you starting again. Or probably not!

Best practice for mobile eCommerce ux

Much of the skill in optimising your online retail business for mobile phone users comes from understanding your customers. What are their decision making processes and behaviours? Basing website design on this naturally incorporates powerful UX principles.

Talk to us about ways mobile eCommerce ux and how to keep your customers happy and tappy!