Mobile commerce sales are projected to grow 4X in just six years from 2016 to 2021. What is even more interesting is the fact that by 2021, M-commerce sales will be around 56% of the total e-commerce sales(Emarketer).
Wonder what this means for online merchants?
Simply put, it means;
- Online buyers prefer to order through their smartphone
- M-commerce gives your brand better visibility
- Going forward M-commerce is the way to better sales
Now that we understand the new tenets of selling online, what should we do next? How do we use this trend to carve a niche for our business? If everybody is moving towards mobile commerce how can we build a strategy that gives us a head start?
To begin with, let us try to find out how M-commerce gives your business a winning edge.
Table of Contents
M-Commerce: Why Your Business Needs It
Some obvious advantages of this new shopping channel are:
- Offers a better and easier shopping experience
- Reaches customers in far-off areas
- Mobile analytics help in tracking browsing behaviour
- Allows to send personalized offers in real time
- Push notifications offer better user engagement
- Faster checkouts with one click checkout
- Bigger ticket size and higher marketing ROI
Optimizing Mobile Commerce For Better Conversions
In this age of M-Commerce, a responsive web design, along with an advanced ecommerce platform built on the mobile-first principle is the key to optimize your site for mobile conversions and stay ahead of the curve.
Here is the to-do list from StoreHippo to optimize your site to increase mobile conversion rates.
1. Let Your Content Sell Your Products
They say, content is the king but in the case of M-commerce - only ‘relevant’ content is the king. Mobile users don’t have the time or patience to read the entire website on their devices. The thumb rule is the more relevant the content, more the sales and vice versa.
Mobile commerce users usually visit a site on impulse or in their free time. Just recall how many times you have opened your favourite shopping app as you were just bored and you wanted to check the price of a particular product, compare products or simply indulge in some window shopping. You wouldn’t like to see a whole page of content in such a situation, right?
So keep your content to the point and be brief. Too much content will distract your customers.
The layout should be designed in a way that only the most relevant content is visible and it should lie above the fold.
The content below the fold is visible only with scrolling. Make sure to show relevant content like price and main features above the fold. If there is a promotion, have it on the first fold. Don’t make users scroll down on your site.
StoreHippo mobile commerce platform offers you a completely customizable frontend along with inbuilt drag and drop tools to customize your themes. Use these tools to create the best landing page, marketing page or product pages for better mobile conversions.
2. Optimize Your Site Performance
Nobody likes a slow loading site. An additional second of load time takes down conversions by 7%. This is even more significant in case of a mobile site. The success of a mobile site depends largely on how fast it loads.
To ensure fast loading sites, your sites should be lightweight. This means the content as well as images should be optimized. And how can you do this easily? Go for a mobile commerce platform that uses Single page architecture (SPA) to make superfast sites.
StoreHippo is built on the mobile-first technology and uses SPA along with global CDN to reduce content load time for the users. Together both these technologies deliver high performing sites that load in no time. Along with this, Storehippo also uses offline caching to offer seamless buying experience even on poor connections or when offline.
3. Fast Mobile Checkouts
Complicated checkouts contribute to a high number of incomplete mobile commerce orders.
In a mobile site it is important to keep your checkout process quite simple. Try to limit your checkout to a single step or a one-page simple process with few clicks. Reduce the number of checkout fields for higher conversions.
It is difficult for people to fill big forms and too many details. Small things like suggesting the address with a Google Maps plug-in will make the checkout experience easier. You can optimize the address filling option by auto-populating the city and state details by simply asking for customers’ zip code.
What’s more, further simplify the mobile commerce ordering process by offering social login or guest checkout. StoreHippo gives you all these options to make your checkout faster and easier.
4. Easy Navigation
Would you like to shop from an online store where you have to keep going back and forth. No, you certainly would stop visiting it forever.
Yes, that’s how important role powerful search and easy navigation plays in better conversions on your online store. This becomes even more underlined when users are purchasing on smartphones with smaller screens.
Make the navigation easy for mobile users. Keep all the buttons and links at a distance to avoid confusion and clicks-by-chance! Leave blank spaces for easier scrolling and lesser strain on eyes. White spaces enhance the effect of the page design and drop-off rates will reduce.
What’s more, go for a mobile ecommerce solution that offers multi-tier categories and powerful search features to help your buyers shop easily on their mobile devices. StoreHippo offers all of this to help you enhance your mobile conversions.
5. Minimize Distractions
Would you like pop-ups, additional forms or complicated filters for product search while you are shopping online? And what if there are only one or two payment options? And how about getting to know about additional shipping charges at checkout?
Eh! you certainly don't want to go any further. There are better sites and better deals!
So what is the loud and clear message for you? As a thumb rule, minimize distractions and offer plenty of choices to your customers on your mobile commerce site. And how best you can do that?
Instead of pop-up offers, create landing pages for your promotions and deals. Make filtering your products easy. Offer a plenty of payment choices including e-wallets and store wallets for faster checkouts. Make shipping charges transparent and offer free shipping wherever and whenever you can.
StoreHippo mobile commerce platform helps you add all these features on your mobile site. Create dynamic marketing pages, offer 50+ domestic and international payment gateways to your customers, pass on the benefits of discounted shipping solutions to your buyers to keep them loyal to your brand.
6. Engage Buyers With Push Notifications
It is important to keep the mobile visitors engaged. There are a variety of ways to keep your buyers engaged with your brand like, videos, offers, contests, or games and puzzles etc on your site as well on your social pages.
Nevertheless, what works best for your mobile commerce conversions are real-time push notifications. Just imagine that you were eyeing those funky t-shirts and you get a push message of 10% off+ FREE shipping on purchase of three t-shirts. Wouldn’t you grab this offer immediately!
Yup that’s the power of real-time push notifications. You not only sold a bigger order than actually intended by the customer. What’s more he/she will spread the word and bring more friends to your site.
StoreHippo gives you inbuilt push notifications to help you use your customers’ browsing stats for customizing your push notifications. Isn’t this an easy way to and gently nudge your buyers towards better mobile commerce conversions.
7. Support Just A Click Away
Mobile users are more than willing to respond to a call while shopping online. Offer them the best support with a click-to-call button. Make calling an easy task for the mobile user visiting your site.
Click-to-call buttons are so designed that it is easy to dial and call the number with the mobile device. If this is not the case, can you imagine the plight of the person who tries to copy and paste a phone number or has to fetch for a pen and paper to jot down a phone number? The person may be stuck in a mobile setting and wishes to urgently contact the retailer for some solution. Do you think after such an experience the customer will be interested in buying from you? Definitely not!
Also, offer chat support which resolves their query in real-time and helps them complete an order or get a solution to their issue. You can also use this feature to upsell your products.
StoreHippo’s mobile ecommerce solution offers seamless integration with a variety of support tools that help you engage and convert your customers better.
Wrap Up
Ecommerce is all set to be dominated by M-commerce in near future. With the increasing penetration of smartphones and internet, M-commerce is opening up new markets for online businesses.
To lead this trend and to make your brand popular you need a smart marketing strategy along with a technically advanced mobile ecommerce solution. StoreHippo offers the best tools to give you a winning edge in the mobile commerce battle. Put your plans together and start our 14-day free trial to explore our amazing features and tools. Start right away!
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