Optimizing Mobile Shopping: A Mobile-First Ecommerce Strategy

With over 6 billion smartphone users worldwide, having your ecommerce website optimized for mobile devices opens a huge doorway for your business. In 2023 alone, mobile sales made up 60% of all ecommerce sales, totaling $2.2 trillion, with those numbers expected to climb. 

Customers are on their phones more and more, so your business’s success depends on you optimizing your mobile ecommerce website for a smooth customer shopping experience.

Responsive Design

With so many mobile users on different devices and software, creating a responsive design is imperative to having a user-friendly website and experience. Responsive design is a website’s ability to adapt to different devices and software such as laptops and mobile devices, or Android and iOS. This means that buttons, texts, and images would adapt to different-sized screens and still be able to be easily read or pushed. In addition to its visual appearance, a responsive design means that a website maintains its speed and other optimized factors no matter the interface.

Show Products Clearly

With the inability to physically inspect a product, product visuals and descriptions need to be clear, concise, and accurate. Make sure customers can easily zoom in and out of high-quality photos of the many angles of the product to feel confident in their purchase.

Easy and Functional Search

A common pain point of mobile ecommerce websites is customers being unable to search for exactly what they are looking for. Make sure your search bar can be found easily and with a phone screen in mind. They should have easy access with the touch of a thumb.

Accessible Customer Support

Without an in-person employee to look out for problems and solve customer complaints, it’s important to have an easy-to-find customer support service that’s also easy to use. Double-check to make sure your customer support can be easily found on your website and quickly respond to customer complaints through live chat options or email. In addition to having an efficient customer support team, have a frequently asked questions page for customers to be able to troubleshoot problems.

An Easy Checkout Flow

An important part of any online shopping experience is a painless checkout experience. Specifically, a mobile ecommerce website should feel seamless at checkout. Address mobile device pain points for customers that may be considered difficult. This could include minimizing the amount of information a customer has to fill out before checking out, auto-filling that information, or even allowing a customer to skip the process altogether by checking out as a guest. It could also include an easy-to-find cart icon and offer quick payment solutions, like PayPal.

Safe and Diverse Payment Options

Many customers will create an account on your mobile ecommerce website, allowing for an even smoother checkout experience. Having secure payment options for customers helps them feel safe creating an account in the first place, and purchasing anything from your website. In addition to safe payment gateways, offering multiple ways to pay can encourage customers to make a mobile purchase, including Buy Now, Pay Later options. Make certain to employ reputable, well-known payment gateways, such as Stripe and PayPal. 

Payment Plugins offers free, downloadable WooCommerce plugins for your mobile ecommerce website. As verified partners with Braintree, PayPal, and Stripe, Payment Plugins give merchants safe and secure payment gateways that are built to grow with their business and ever-changing websites. Along with being built to last for your expanding business, these reputable payment gateways offer an array of diverse payment options as a convenience for you and for your customer base.