Optimize your eCommerce Store for Mobile Devices

Mobile Commerce Optimization for your eCommerce Store

Mobile Commerce (or mCommerce), where online consumers make a purchase on their cell phone or mobile device, grows significantly year after year. This trend of online shoppers preferring to shop online via mobile device is only expected to continue to climb. With nearly 45% of all eCommerce sales in the United States and 60% globally coming from mobile, this is a topic that we want to dive a little deeper into and make sure that you are doing everything you can be to provide a great mobile experience for your customers.

Reasons to Optimize your Online Store for Mobile

Have you ever been browsing Instagram on your phone when an ad pops up for just the kind of hoodie you've been looking for? But then you click the link and go to the online store and you see overlapping text, distorted images, or content that has crazy spacing and you have to scroll for 30 seconds to see the next line of text? If you're a super patient online shopper, maybe you visit the website on desktop and everything looks a-ok. That, my friend, is an eCommerce store that hasn't been optimized for mobile.

It's actually way more common than one may think for an online storefront to not be optimized for mobile, but this creates real problems for your business. Especially when you consider that customers who have a negative experience on a mobile site are over 60% less likely to purchase a product from you in the future. And it's even more of an issue when you consider that the world’s mCommerce sales are set to make up for 53.9% of all eCommerce sales in 2021.

This means that it's actually more important that your eCommerce store is mobile focused as opposed to focusing on making a pristine desktop version of your online store. The sales are happening on iPhones these days as opposed to desktops, and you have to make sure your Shopify store is geared towards that.

What it Means to Optimize your eCommerce Store for Mobile Devices

Optimizing your online storefront for mobile means more than just making sure you have responsive design that looks good on every display. It also means making sure that your images and fonts are sized correctly and in a way that doesn't significantly slow down the loading time of your website. While design and user experience (UX) are super important when it comes to creating an attractive eCommerce storefront, finding the right balance between high-level design and optimized website speed is critical. Long mobile loading times is a major issue that can drastically increase your eCommerce store's bounce rates, i.e. the percentage of users that leave your website after viewing just one page.

Customers who have a negative experience on a mobile site are over 60% less likely to purchase a product from you in the future.

The probability of a user 'bouncing' from a mobile webpage increases by over 30% if the page takes between one and three seconds to load compared to pages that load in under one second, highlighting the importance of making sure your eCommerce store can load in under or as close to one second as possible. And this makes sense from an online consumer's perspective if you think about how you browse the internet on your phone. If a site takes a long time to load, I'd bet almost every single one of you reading this blog would exit the site and browse for another source.

eCommerce is Increasingly Mobile-First

Hopefully you gained some new insight into just how important it is to optimize your eCommerce store for mobile devices. Because, while people will undoubtedly always do some online shopping via computers, all of the data and trends show that mobile will be the primary way that online shoppers look for and buy eCommerce products going forward. And if you want to continue growing your online store and increasing sales, you have to be in front of that curve, because your competition certainly will be. If you ever have any questions about how improve your store's mobile experience, or if you want to chat about order fulfillment solutions, reach out to PackYak anytime - this Yak has a full team of eCommerce wizards and fulfillment experts! Get a custom fulfillment services quote today, no strings attached!

That's all for this week's edition of The New Yak Times, tune in next week and subscribe below!