Make Mobile Shopping Easy on Your Shopify and Shopify Plus Store!

Currently, mobile commerce accounts for over 67.2% of all eCommerce.

Thanks to the pandemic-induced lockdown, people have also started buying daily essentials and groceries through their mobiles.

There are many reasons why consumers prefer shopping on smartphones: It’s easy and convenient, saves time, and allows one to shop on the go, among other factors.

To give you a sense of how much mobile shopping has picked up in the last year – 75% of customers have tried new brands since the pandemic started. More than half of them discovered brands on social media applications, which are predominantly used on mobile devices.

But, with a lot of brands moving online, businesses big and small are facing increased competition.

One of the ways to make a lasting impression is to actually make their shopping experience so good that it’s hard to forget. But on the device of their choice – mobile.

While most Shopify and Shopify Plus stores are responsive in nature, there’s more that goes into enhancing your store experience for mobile shoppers.

To get to the point, let’s talk about how you can optimize your Shopify and Shopify Plus stores for mobile or smaller screen devices. And no, we’re not talking about responsiveness again!

How to make your Shopify Plus brand sticky for mobile shoppers

1. Set up mobile customer account page

Believe it or not, but offering a good Shopify customer account page is one of the most essential factors if you want to make your brand’s mobile shopping experience sticky. Think about how easy a mobile customer account page makes shopping on Amazon.

Let’s give you some examples to put things in perspective.

EXAMPLE 1

A customer who made a guest checkout through mobile revisits your store to reorder. He goes through the tedious process of searching your whole site for the same item on his mobile. After searching for a long time, he gives up.

Instead, if this shopper had a customer account, it would have taken him three steps and less than a minute to reorder that item. How? Go to the customer account page, go to orders, click on ‘reorder’ or ‘add to cart’. So simple!

EXAMPLE 2

Now think about this: For your registered users, you have information such as birthdate, location, recently viewed products, etc. But you don’t have any of this for shoppers who choose to guest-checkout. Who do you think you’d be able to engage more with personalized offers and promotions? Obviously, the customer registered on your site. Right?

Similarly, there are many more benefits of having a mobile customer account page on your Shopify store:

• With a mobile customer account page, you can use customers’ data to understand them better and nudge them to make more purchases
• Customer account page features such as returns, exchanges, raise issues, etc. help you build customer trust and loyalty, giving your business a competitive advantage
• The saved delivery addresses, wishlists and payment details make all future purchases quicker – especially on mobile devices

2. Focus on localization of your storefront

If you want to increase sales through mobile, your Shopify and Shopify Plus brand needs to be discovered by more and more people. This means reaching out to people of a broad demographic.

Most brands today are selling cross-border; that is, across multiple target locations. This means targeting people who speak different languages, follow different cultures, and are based in different locations.

The key – localization.

For mobile sites, localization means adapting your products/services, content and other important features, to cater to local people in different geographies. Basically, making your brand feel closer to them even when it is now.

Now, with GPS being a major advantage for mobiles, you can optimize your store with dynamic features to attract local shoppers easily.

Here are some ways:

• Make it easy for visitors to relate to your content – use language and content translation tools
• Make it easy to understand pricing – add a currency converter tool or display currency based on location
• Make payments seamless – provide multiple, local payment options preferred by shoppers in that area
• Display local social proof – reviews and ratings from local customers can help you win more hearts
• Make your website come up on search engines – translate metadata for SEO and focus on ranking for local keywords

It’s a lot of work, but localization helps!

And numbers don’t lie. 65% of consumers prefer content in their language and 40% strictly don’t buy from sites that don’t support their language.

See this illustration:

Big brands are doing it – ASOS caters to seven languages and accepts 19 currencies; AirBnB supports 62 languages; Amazon offers different landing pages depending on visitors’ locations.

And small brands are jumping on the bandwagon. At some point, soon, it’s going to be a must. We say, get started now.

3. Support multiple currencies

Imagine this — a shopper from Europe wants to buy something from an Indian website but sees all prices in Indian Rupees. Chances are, it might confuse them and they might not want to go through the process of working out the conversion.

Hence, your Shopify and Shopify Plus store must support multiple currencies. And here are some solid reasons for it:

• If you want to scale your business, expand geographies, you will need to support multiple currencies
• Unfamiliar, foreign currency can discourage many shoppers
• Customers might incur extra costs – exchange rates, or hidden costs when paying in other currencies
• By displaying the local currency, you can offer a localized experience, which helps increase conversion rates; use the geolocation and GPS features of their mobile phones
• It helps you build trust with new local customers when you enter new geographical markets

4. Enable easy sign up and login using social accounts

Social logins are an effective way to optimize your Shopify and Shopify Plus store for mobile. 99% of people access social media through their phones. If you offer social login, you can use this information to autofill registration forms. Make sign-ups fast and authentic!

Here’s how offering social logins can enhance customers experience while they shop on mobile devices:

• It makes registrations and authorizations quicker
• It ensures accurate customer data; when shoppers sign up otherwise, they use incorrect data 80% of the time
• You can use the social login data for targeted social media marketing and advertising campaigns

So, what are some of the ways to encourage social logins?

• Offer shoppers store credits to encourage them to login via social
• You could allow only social logins, although that might be risky as you may lose customers who don’t use social media
• Allow shoppers to sign up through multiple social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Amazon, etc; allowing flexibility improves retention, number of site visits and conversions

5. Set up a Shopify loyalty program

Loyalty programs are one of the most effective ways to drive customer engagement and sales for your Shopify and Shopify Plus stores – yes, even as of today. 87% of consumers want brands to have loyalty programs. And more than 60% of marketers believe having a loyalty program helps the business grow. Here are some reasons:

• It motivates customers to engage more with your brand
• It makes customers’ shopping experience delightful
• It helps you nudge customers to take desired actions
• It inspires long-term relationships as customers keep engaging to earn more rewards

With more people shopping from their mobile phones, you can take your loyalty program a notch higher. Mobile shopping has almost an instantaneous effect on shoppers’ behavior. You can use this to your benefit.

How?

• Offer loyalty rewards in real-time while customers are shopping on mobile
• Make the rewards personalized and relevant to actions they can easily take on mobile devices
• Encourage customers to refer their friends and family via chat apps that are on their mobile devices already
• Offer mobile-specific rewards and discounts

If you have a mobile customer account page using the Flits Shopify app, you can set up a loyalty program using store credits. This lets customers see their store credits earned and spent easily even on mobile devices; nudging them to interact with you more often.

6. Create an intuitive checkout process

Customers shop from their mobiles because of ease and convenience. An overly complicated checkout process on mobile might scare them off in an instant.

Think about having to complete lengthy forms just to complete a purchase of a product you want to place an order for ASAP.

To improve conversions and reduce cart abandonment from your mobile stores, a seamless checkout process is critical. In other words – make it intuitive.

Today’s customers use multiple payment options such as internet banking, cards, and mobile payment options such as wallets and Apple Pay.

To optimize your checkout flow, you should:

• Make sure you offer multiple payment options that are mobile-centric in nature
• Allow customers to pay through mobile payment options such as wallets and Apple Pay with a one-click functionality
• Ensure that the mobile payment options show up first, as it allows quick checkouts and saves time
• Sync your website and mobile store so that if a customer has their payment and delivery details stored on the website, it automatically shows on your mobile site too
• Offer auto-fill for common fields such as name, email address and more

7. Optimize your content for smaller screens

Yes, you may want to make your mobile site comprehensive and give as much information about your products, but remember – mobile screens are much smaller than desktops. And so, it makes scrolling and browsing more difficult.

You’ll have to be smart about what information you’re sharing and how you’re displaying it.

Take some cues from here:

• Keep the information concise yet clear enough to make an impact on the mobile shopper
• Use bold buttons and place them in the right spots to fit the mobile screen
• Display the most important information up top
• Make your call-to-action buttons visible and big enough to click with fingers on a small screen
• Include mobile-friendly images and videos
• Make sure your customer account page is mobile-friendly in terms of display and ease of login

8. Display personalized product recommendations

Did you know our attention span on mobile devices is much lesser than that on laptops and desktops? What does this mean for your mobile shoppers?

One message on a chat app, and they will move away from your store in seconds. The chances of them coming back to it being so less that you’ve as good as lost them.

So what can you do? Keep them engaged beyond what they came looking for.

Display product recommendations based on what they’re interested in and nudge them to explore more products on your store.

Here are some examples of dynamic product recommendations:

• If a customer visits your store for a specific product, show them “Similar Products” so that they know of the options available to them
• If a customer keeps visiting your store often for simply browsing, chances are that they might buy something they really like, on impulse; show them “Best Sellers” and “Trending” items
• When a customer makes a purchase, show them “People who bought this, also bought” items in real time

Simply put, the goal here is to engage a mobile shopper by continually displaying things they are more likely to buy. Similar to how you just keep browsing through Instagram posts and Reels, and it takes you a whole of 5 minutes before you realise how long it has been!

Remember, the longer one stays on your store, the higher are the chances of them making a purchase.

9. Limit the number of intrusive pop-ups

Let’s be straightforward here – pop-ups can be really annoying. And when they appear on your smartphones, your visitors are just a second away from leaving your site.

For instance, on a bigger screen a popup that gets displayed right in the center of your screen may not look as annoying. The same popup when viewed on a mobile screen, blocks all the content on the store behind it – not what the visitor came for!

And for this reason, it’s best to limit or even completely eliminate pop-ups when customers are browning your site on mobile. It will also help keep your site clean and enhance your customers’ shopping experience.

However, if you really have to use pop-ups, follow these best practices:

• Display pop-ups only if they have context; avoid the unnecessary ones
• Make sure they don’t appear immediately; time them based on the session duration
• Keep pop-up content clear and concise
• Display pop-ups in the form of banners at the top or bottom of the screen

10. Simplify the navigation on your store

If you have a large inventory of products, this one is most certainly for you.

While on desktop or bigger screens, viewing a mega menu is not a problem, it is not the same for mobile shoppers.

The bigger the menu, the more categories and subcategories you have. That automatically means presenting the mobile shopper with all too many options to browse through before selecting what he actually wants to explore.

In most cases, you will lose the shopper right there.

We spoke to a number of Shopify experts and here’s what they say – simplify the navigation on mobile devices.

Keep only the broad level categories or collections on your store. Present the shoppers with only as many options as needed; the lesser, the better.

Although, do make sure your mobile menu does cover all your products.

11. Optimize your Shopify and Shopify Plus store to load fast

We live in a world where people expect everything to happen at a click of a button, within a split second, and instantaneously.

53% of visitors to your site might abandon it if it takes more than three seconds to load. They’ll move on to another site.

For your store’s mobile version, Speed = Money. It’s true.

See these unthinkable facts:

So, how can you optimize your Shopify and Shopify Plus mobile store to ensure it loads fast? Also keeping in mind that not all your visitors will have the same strength of network while accessing your website.

Some key factors to consider:

• Smaller pages load faster; keep only the most important features and information on pages for mobile devices
• Functionality – make sure your site offers the most important functionalities such as the customer account page, seamless checkout process, etc
• Leverage features of mobile devices such as camera, GPS, notifications, and chat, to enhance functionality and customer experience

How to create the perfect mobile shopping experience?

Okay, maybe ‘perfect’ is being overambitious because things are always changing and you need to keep experimenting.

What we’re trying to say is, make it easier for your mobile shoppers to make their first purchase, sign up to your customer account, and then keep coming back to your store to buy more.

The first step – and we can’t stress enough – is to learn from the likes of Amazon and Walmart. The retail leaders have embedded customer account pages into their mobile apps, making it not just easy for shoppers to make purchases, but also plan their future purchases.

And we want to make this strategy easily doable for you.

With Flits, you can set up a customer account page in minutes. Our customer account pages are responsive in nature and hence adapt to smaller screens whilst offering all the powerful features packed in it!

If your Shopify or Shopify Plus brand has a mobile app, we easily integrate with the mobile app builder as well. This way we ensure the experience offered on your mobile customer account pages does not get compromised even by a percent.

Ready to take on mobile shopping and grow your store?

Install the Flits app today.