2020 had us moving to online shopping for even the bare minimum. But there’s more to it than just hopping onto our desktop for making purchases. We also moved to use our mobile devices extensively, picking them up at least 78 times every day. In most cases, to browse through social media and surprisingly, even make those online purchases we started this conversation with. That’s why the mobile shopping experience you offer on your Shopify store matters now more than ever!
According to statistics, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months or less. The share of mCommerce has risen to 72.9% in 2021 itself and is stated to rise even higher in the coming years.
But here’s another fact just to tell you a little more about mobile shoppers. More than 47% of them will walk away from their favourite online store owing to one bad experience. Now given the number of options they have today, it’s really getting tougher to hold back store visitors from walking away.
What are we trying to say? If you aren’t focusing on your mobile shoppers, you’re losing out on revenue. You’re literally handing it all over to your competitors instead!
So what can you do?
Strategies to improve your mobile shopping experience
1. Go beyond responsive websites and think mobile-first
The number one thing that we found industry-leading brands focus on, is ensuring their website design and experience is tailored to suit mobile devices. Now typically an online store would use a responsive design or a Shopify theme to cater to their audience that comes from small screen devices.
While responsive design is still a must-have, start differently. When you know that a majority of your store visitors are coming from mobile devices, make your website mobile-first. And by this, we mean looking into the smaller details that a responsive design may or may not cater to entirely – think about those landing pages you view on mobile, that just don’t seem to end.
So here are some of the best practices we’ve seen on Shopify Plus stores:
- Make your content crisp, clear and actionable
- Ensure that you format your content for easy reading on smaller devices
- Reduce your image and video size or make them responsive
- Streamline the number of items in your navigation
- Reduce the overall number of pages viewable on mobile
- Make your search widget responsive, typo-tolerant and offer synonym search with auto-suggestions
- Optimize your product filters for easy narrow-down of search results
- Keep in mind the fat-thumb theory to place your call-to-action buttons appropriately
- Ensure your mobile site loads in three seconds or less
2. Set up a Shopify customer account page for mobile shoppers
Mobile shoppers are looking for ease of shopping. This means they want to be able to make purchases on the go and in minutes. To be able to do this, your mobile store visitors should be able create wishlists, view products they recently checked out, browse through their order history to place reorders – all without having to start their journey from scratch, from the search bar of your store.
In addition to this, your mobile shoppers are already used to the experience Amazon offers, wherein they can actually even save their delivery addresses in the account, making checkout faster. Who doesn’t like lesser typing on mobile devices!
With Flits, your Shopify store can do this easily. It enables you to set up a customer account page that comes with mobile-friendly features like:
- Easy social login for quick sign up and login on mobile devices
- Ability to view order history
- One-click add-to-cart reorders
- Ability to buy from the wishlist in a single click
- Save multiple delivery addresses and other information
- Manage returns, refunds and exchanges
- Contact the brand easily for support
- Track order status
- Set up a loyalty program to increase repeat purchases with store credits
Please note: Some of these features are enabled via paid add-ons or may require you to integrate with another Shopify app.
3. Explore leveraging progressive web apps (PWA)
One of the biggest reasons Amazon is a household name is that they’ve had a mobile app for years, making it simpler for consumers to make purchases, no matter where they are. If you think beyond them, even the likes of Zara and H&M launched their mobile apps to enable faster shopping on mobile devices last year, taking the lead on making mobile shopping a great experience.
Now building a native mobile app may or may not fall under everyone’s radar, owing to the resources available to them. But your Shopify store can still deliver the experience of a native app using a PWA.
PWA is a web app that allows you to develop an online store that can run easily on both desktop and mobile. But on mobile, it gives the users the look and feels, and experience of a native mobile app instead of a mobile site.
This nifty strategy has proven to improve the conversion rates on mobile by 36%.
Alibaba, a world-renowned name in the eCommerce industry, also moved to PWAs on realizing that most of their shoppers came from mobile devices. This helped the brand improve its mobile conversions by a whopping 76%. They also noticed a steep increase in the engagement rate of shoppers across both iOS and Android devices.
The best part of PWAs?
- Faster load time on mobile devices
- Similar functionalities as that of a native mobile app
- Does not require the shopper to install an app (lesser commitment, higher conversions)
- Works seamlessly with all the other Shopify apps you’re making use of
4. Streamline your mobile checkout flow
A responsive website and a PWA may ensure that it’s easy to complete checkout on a mobile device. But at the same time, you need to ensure you’re not going overboard, trying to capture all the shopper information you can as they move to checkout – especially on mobile.
One of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment on mobile devices is that it took too long for a visitor to complete checkout. A few ways to streamline the checkout flow on mobile includes:
- Reducing the number of steps in the checkout process
- Adding a progress bar on the top or bottom of the page
- Decreasing the number of form fields
- Offering a single-click checkout or guest checkout
- Reducing navigation and removing distractions from the pages
- Ensuring a faster load time across all steps
- Make your primary call to action button sticky and easy-to-use on smaller screens
- Be fat-finger friendly
- Make the cart easily editable
- Ensure you keep all the information on billing, shipping and delivery crystal clear
Take a look at this checkout flow:
And now, take a look at this one:
Which one are you more likely to complete when on mobile? Obviously the latter.
5. Display product recommendations
Most eCommerce blogs will tell you that displaying product recommendations is a great tactic to upsell and cross-sell. While that’s true, displaying recommendations also improves the shopping experience as it smoothly guides the visitor to check out products that might interest them based on what they’re viewing.
Pretty much similar to how you’re happy when an in-store salesperson understands your preferences and guides you to the right collection.
On mobile devices, this is even more important. Since most of these shoppers land on your site via a marketing or advertising campaign, there’s a high chance they visit only one page.
Let’s assume that product is out of stock or they don’t find their size/ color preference. This negates the experience of your store no matter how optimized it is for mobile viewing – simply because they thought it is going to be tedious to explore other products on your site owing to the smaller screen.
What can you do?
- Display similar products or collections across all your pages
- Dynamically adapt the recommendations to the products being viewed
- Display the recently viewed products to make it easier to go back
- Showcase product ratings in the recommendations to cut to and fro to pages
- Add an add-to-cart button on your recommendations for easy checkout
Do you have what it takes to turn a mobile store visitor into a customer?
When it comes to creating a mobile shopping experience for your audience, there are a number of things listed as to-dos. But the truth remains that your focus should be on things that will make it easier for the shopper to interact with your site, explore your products and make purchases. It’s as simple and as complicated as that!
There are of course many other things that you need to do to be able to offer a great mobile shopping experience on your Shopify store. But from our experience in the partner ecosystem, we’ve seen brands that focus on these 5 must-haves, to begin with, do better.
And we’ll give you a springboard if you already have a mobile app, a PWA, or even a responsive site – Mobile customer account pages on Shopify.
