There are some ground rules to understand about owning a mobile ecommerce website. These rules help optimize your online store, both for site quality and customer satisfaction.
This article explains all the essential things you need to know when building a mobile online store. Let’s check them out.
1. Make It Easy For Customers
The mobile layout is the simplified version of your website, so make every experience easy for the customers. An easy-to-use mobile ecommerce experience helps increase your online store growth, as customers are less likely to quit mid-purchase.
The aim of making everything easy is that customers can seamlessly browse, check out, and make payments on your online store using their smartphones.
Therefore, start by creating a wireframe that covers the entire mobile layout. The wireframe guides you through the mobile web creation process, so you’ll understand what to include and eliminate.
After that, pay attention to your web hosting. Ensure that it’s capable of handling requests coming from the mobile web. If you’re using a website builder, always choose responsive templates for better compatibility.
2. Leverage Visuals
32% of marketers believe that visual images are the most important content type. Also, Visuals can elevate your mobile web and its content, especially the right types.
Moreover, they help understand your message better – even for first-time visitors. They also work great for data visualization. However, the effort doesn’t stop at simply adding visuals to your mobile store.
Prioritize adding high-quality visuals. Tweak images or video sizes to fit mobile screens without changing any layout. Use relevant visuals on your products and incorporate them into your blog page.
3. Simple Navigation
Simple navigation is handy for mobile websites. Aside from adding simplicity, it’s also beneficial to make it intuitive. This allows users to find what they’re looking for easily, with just a few clicks.
It also works for marketing and promotions, as simple navigation also increases the mobile website’s SEO quality and page rankings.
Based on your wireframe, create simple navigation by reducing the number of pages, links, or clicks as much as possible. Apply a mobile-first approach and remember the rules of prioritizing short and simple navigation.
Be thoughtful about the fonts and colors you’re using. Additionally, consider both Android and iOS users to cover more audience demographics.
4. Improve UX
The key to improving your mobile web user experience (UX) is keeping it a step better than the desktop version. Doing so results in an efficient production cost, increased user engagement and satisfaction, and reduced bounce rates.
For better practices, understand the user journey of your mobile website to see what needs improvement. Apply practical UX principles and include the essential UX elements.
Also, practice proper UX design processes that cover user research, design, testing, and implementation. UX is an iterative process, so be prepared to constantly change your design to reach an effective mobile design.
5. Utilize Simple Forms
Forms help multiple activities, like the sign-up, check out, inquire feedback, add shipping details, and obtain newsletter sign-ups. The goal is to have simple forms for users not to feel obligated to fill them out.
The ideal, simple forms combine the right amount of user interaction and form design with improving the experience. With more users filling out forms, the more you can achieve your targets.
To achieve this, create a solid foundation. Start by making the form structure, input fields, field labels, action buttons, and feedback sections. Avoid having the user type their email addresses twice, and always provide an option to show passwords.
Check out these best practices to help add the right button, slides, and placeholder texts for your forms.
6. Have Clear and Repeated CTAs
Clear and repeated call-to-actions (CTAs) allow you to gain high conversions. This is because your CTAs work with your users to navigate throughout your site, not against them. You can also increase a significant amount of click rates.
Business-wise, your CTAs help meet sales targets from revenue-building, increase the customer base, and leverage social media promotion strategies.
Take this strategy into practice by adding CTAs multiple times on a page, especially those that gain the most conversions. Always set the purposes of your CTAs based on your business targets. Also, actively measure and monitor their results.
7. Give Multiple Payment Methods
A part of a seamless user journey also includes making the sales. Therefore, offering multiple payment methods is a step you can’t miss. By offering multiple payment methods, users don’t need to figure things out before paying.
Including this strategy also allows existing customers to prefer your online store, even in the long run. Therefore, consider the most popular payment methods for mobile ecommerce, which are cash, credit card, and bank transfer.
For choosing the payment gateways, choose the suitable ones with your website. Also, pay attention to your target audience.
Consider big-name platforms like PayPal if you cover international payment and shipping. Choose local payment gateways or bank transfer if you’re targeting the local target market.
Remember to test the payment methods before making your mobile web live.
8. Keep Everything In the Thumb Zone
Scrolling on mobile websites is easier when you keep everything within the customer’s thumb.
75% of people use only their thumbs to navigate when using the mobile device.
Therefore, keep essential elements, like buttons and links, on the center of the screen or keep them within the thumb zone. Once all is set, test the layout yourself to test the functionality.
Including this results in a simpler overall user experience and increases mobile web usability. In the long run, this improves your online store quality for both the customers and search engines.
Conclusion
To sum up, this article has explained the eight ways to optimize your mobile online store. These strategies help improve its quality for business growth.