With the growing trend of mobile & tablet usage, it has become more important than ever to focus on your responsive eCommerce store.
Do you know that more than 60% of internet users access their social media account through their mobiles and tablets? At the same time, we also know that social media is one of the best mediums to get targeted traffic to an eCommerce website.
The above fact simply means that if you run an eCommerce store and you want to grow your sales, you must ensure to optimize your online store for smart devices, especially mobiles.
In this blog post, I will be going to share 8 tips for you to improve & optimize your eCommerce store for mobile.
#1 Keep it simple
No matter how busy is your desktop version of your website, you must make sure that the responsive design of your eCommerce website must be simple and clean.
Mobile users are not the same as desktop users.
Mobile users may be viewing your website on the go, waiting in a long queue, on trains, buses, and so on. Understanding this fact, a mobile eCommerce store must be designed with a simple design. The more busy your mobile version is, the higher will be the chances that your users will quit.
#2 Responsive menu
We all know how important it is to have user-friendly navigation for an eCommerce website but when it comes to a responsive eCommerce design, it even becomes more crucial.
Why?
Firstly, the screen size of mobiles is quite small. In the absence of a responsive menu, the users won’t be able to browse the products on your eCommerce store conveniently. They will always need to zoom in in order to use the navigation of your website.
Secondly, when you show a responsive menu on mobiles, the button and font size of menu links become large and clear enough to be able to be used with a single easily.
So, it does make sense to ensure intuitive menu navigation for your eCommerce store.
#3 Choose the fonts wisely
A responsive web design doesn’t just mean having a mobile-compatible website. But the overall look of your website must be intuitive and user-friendly too.
For example, the font style.
Yes, if you really want the users to stay users on your website for a longer period of time, you must ensure that your web designer uses appropriate font family, font size, and font spacing on the responsive web design.
The font size of your responsive website must be easily read by users of all age groups.
#4 Use smart search
A search feature plays an important role in an eCommerce website to facilitate users to search and buy products. If you are not using a user-friendly search feature on your online shop, you are literally asking your users to do the heavy lifting themselves and find their desired products.
What does a smart search do?
A smart search shows up the suggested products to your users when they start typing their desired product name(s). I am sure you must have been to a website that allows you to type a product name in their search bar and when you start doing so, it shows some suggested products from their database automatically and you clicked a product name among those lists and found your desired product.
A smart search helps to make device users’ browsing experience convenient and get more sales through mobiles.
#5 Checkout forms must be easy to fill
Checkout forms are perhaps the most important element of any eCommerce website. Not only this but to a large extent, the success of an eCommerce website depends on the flow of its checkout process.
Given that the screen size of mobile is small, utmost care must be taken while optimizing the checkout pages for a responsive eCommerce store. You must consult an experienced web developer who is also good at creating landing pages. No matter how good your website looks, or how competitive your product prices are, if the checkout process of your mobile store sucks, it will affect your eCommerce sales badly.
Here are a few tips to optimize the checkout forms of your eCommerce website.
a. Ensure that all the fields of your checkout forms are sufficiently big (considering thin and thick thumbs).
b. Make sure that there is no horizontal scrolling throughout the checkout process.
c. If you really need to ask for too much information from your buyer (according to your business type), ensure that you divide the checkout form into multiple steps so that it’s easier for your potential buyers to fill it conveniently.
#6 Take care of alignment of important texts
I have personally come across a few eCommerce websites that have some of the field labels or texts like terms & conditions on their checkout forms out of alignment. This kind of bad experience must be avoided at any cost.
As I mentioned previously, you must not rely on the testing of your web developer only. But you must also ask your friends and family to use your eCommerce store on their mobiles and purchase a few items before you invite the whole world to buy.
#7 Render the sections/blocks logically
A responsive web design doesn’t necessarily mean that all the elements of your website must be rendered/displayed one by one so that the users keep scrolling to the end of the page.
Instead, a responsive design must be implemented to make the users’ experience better on their devices. Having said this, it would be good if you can give away some of the unnecessary elements from your checkout pages.
For eg., if your online store has too many elements on your web pages that are not even necessary for your users to view in order to purchase the products from you, it’s advisable to remove them from the responsive view of your checkout pages.
Likewise, if the desktop version of your eCommerce website shows advertising banners or too many footer links at the bottom of the checkout page, you can either remove them from both versions (desktop & mobile) or at least remove them from your mobile version.
Why?
It’s easy for mobile users to get distracted by viewing too much information. In other words, you must ensure that the responsive version of your eCommerce website must be as clean as possible.
#8 Image resizing
Have you checked that all the product images of your online store are well-resized for your responsive web design? It’s quite common for web developers to ignore the final output of the product view on the mobile version.
If at all, your website has such issues, you better don’t encourage your potential buyers to access your website on their mobiles.
I believe it’s needless for me to emphasize the importance of having an appropriate image size for your products here, especially when we are talking about eCommerce websites.
All that the users know about your business, is through your website only. They haven’t visited your physical store or haven’t met you at all. So it’s the only website that can build or ruin the rapport of your eCommerce business.
Conclusion:
Optimizing an eCommerce website for smart devices like mobiles & tables is as important as its existence in the first place. It’s because most users these days search, find, and buy products using their mobile devices only. Therefore, if you really want to see huge growth in the overall sales of your eCommerce business, you must start paying attention to the responsive version of your online store.