The basic ground rule is to make the information on your mobile site as easy to find and read as possible while offering precise unique content. So there are some common principles which you should adhere to for boosting your retail based Mobile m-commerce site or mobile app. There’s a good chance if you’re a retailer, someone may directly search for your mobile e-commerce site. Of the 47% percent of consumers who happens to own a smartphone, 37% percent of them has indicated that they’ll use their mobile device while they’re out and shopping around this year.
So taking that into account, listed are the top tips which retailers can immediately take to ensure that their mobile sites will perform well.
Keeping It Simple
For mobiles, keeping the site or app as simple as possible is the key. The user interface should be easy to read and should invite the user to explore your site further. Expose just your most important content while making sure that the functionality is easy to suit the “on the go” user navigating their small smartphone screens.
You should know that consumers will access your site using a variety of different platforms which runs their mobile devices. So when creating your mobile site, it’s critical that you test your site over all of the different mobile web platforms. Being familiar with the various mobile devices and their specific operating systems and versions is extremely important.
Also, if you’re planning to develop an app, you’ll need to build them to cater the major smartphone operating systems. So familiarize yourself with exactly how mobile sites as well as apps render on the various devices.
Mirror Your Main Site
Your m-commerce site or your app should mirror your main e-commerce site as much as possible, so that they’ll appear uniform and familiar with your consumer. If your mobile environment looks familiar, then the entire shopping process becomes easier and the overall engagement and conversion rates will be higher.
Smartphones offer convenience, so retailers should not be ignoring their m-commerce offerings. To attract user adoption, the mobile site or app should be offering quick and useful information, such as a offering a one-touch “buy” button to payment, or offering quick search results without having to flip through several pages or scrolling down.
Keeping It Social
It’s extremely important to remember that smartphones are incredible social devices for consumers. So make it as easy as possible for users to promote your products for you by offering unbiased reviews and ratings while encouraging them to share their own reviews by providing easy one-touch posting capabilities linking your site to Twitter or Facebook.
Smartphone owners are known to be unforgiving if a site or an app isn’t relevant to what they’re looking for. So that split second window of opportunity which you have to immediately engage your mobile user should be exactly what their looking for.
If you offer irrelevant promotions, it will just frustrate them, thus consuming their valuable time and wasting your screen real estate. You should avoid that outcome at all costs by knowing your customers exact analytics to create and offer promotions which appeals to them.
Forcing your mobile customers to fill in long time consuming forms during the checkout process can also lead towards frustration and immediate cart abandonment. So use the payment screen to provide as much relevant info as possible from the buyers point of view, such as billing or the shipping address etc.
Making Them Return
Your mobile m-commerce site or app should be able to draw your consumers back, so you need to create a method of motivating your consumers to return. You can use methods such as offering daily coupons or an incentive based loyalty program for repeat buyers.
Keep in mind that your m-commerce site or app is just one component, yet an important one, of your overall marketing strategy for reaching as many customers as possible. So you shouldn’t be ignoring your main e-commerce site or store. Use the smartphone or tablets ability to be able to use location-based services in helping your consumers to find the closest offline store or use QR codes which will link your products to your mobile web-based content.
You as a retailer should be constantly monitoring how your consumers usage habits change when it comes to mobile. Precise analytic data is necessary for the mobile channel, this for you to crunch all the data to analyze the users experience. Tracking how these consumers directly interact with your m-commerce site or app is critical.