We all know that mobile plays an increasingly growing part in the e-commerce domain. For instance, mobile sales on Black Friday show a 31% increase year-over-year, and this trend is expected to continue.
Today, most of the traffic online stores receive is coming from mobile – 79% to be exact. Do you spend 79% of your time and resources optimizing for mobile? Most merchants do not.
Why the mobile shopping experience was shaped into what we know today?
Do you know why train rail width is 4 feet and 8.5 inches? This was the standard width of the horse carriages back in the day. Roads were built to match the carriages, later the roads became railroads with the same width.
Can you guess why our keyboard is arranged the way it is (called QWERTY)? It had been created this way to slow down typists. Mechanical typewriters would jam when hitting too fast.
OK, but what does keyboard setting or railroads have to do with e-commerce? They show us the way men, history, and technology evolve.
E-commerce started from the desktop, so all the infrastructures and especially the mindset, are set to fit the desktop shopping experience. Today when we all move to mobile, the shopping experience is almost the same as the desktop with a few modifications (responsiveness for example). Why? Historical reasons.
In what ways mobile traffic is different from desktop traffic? There are 4 major differences:
Store Speed
Your visitors are expecting things to upload immediately, buttons to respond within milliseconds. While true on desktop, it is crucial for mobile. There are many guides for improving your store upload speed so we won’t go deep here, but the main two things to look for are infrastructures and images sizes.
Visual
It’s a lot harder to read large amounts of text on mobile, so if your site is not highly visual and attractive, your customer will get frustrated and will leave your store.
Wow effect
Your mobile users expect you to wow them, they have little patience for empty slogans, the same old layouts, and boring lists of products. This is especially true for millennials and Z generation.
It’s very hard to create something extraordinary because the competition is fierce and expectations are high.
Usually, if you want to create a whole new experience it’ll cost you. However, today platforms like Shopify, make store owner’s lives easier with apps that can help get that wow effect with almost no effort. One such app is Swipify (free plan available). Swipify takes any Shopify store and transforms its mobile experience into a Tinder-like experience: Swipe right if you like an item and left if not. Note that Swipify was made only for mobile, and created a totally different experience from what customers know from the desktop. It also solves the visual and speed issues discussed before by generating a fast, fun, and highly visual shopping experience. Thanks to the Shopify platform you can add apps like Swipify for free and within 30 seconds have a huge impact on your mobile traffic.
Trust
One of the biggest heralds of e-commerce since the beginning is to establish trust. This is true for desktop stores, but for mobile, it can be the difference between a successful store and a bust.
Trust is both logical and emotional, and when a customer feels he is in a safe zone, he lowers his guards and ultimately buys more.
Trust can be gained in several ways, for instance by having clear contact information and privacy policy, by having security badges, and by social proof.
One of the best ways to generate social proof is to show former happy customers. One app that can help you do it is Loox, that not only shows reviews, but also pictures of happy (or unhappy) customers and the products they bought. Loox crew was smart enough to take care of the social proof problem while using visual tools (which is super important as we discussed earlier).
Mobile customers are here to stay if you will be smart enough to adapt, stay ahead of the curve, and use the tools you have at your disposal like the apps mentioned above. You will be rewarded with higher sales and happier customers in the following years.
About the author: Yoav Fael, a serial entrepreneur, works for 12 years in different aspects of the e-commerce domain: mobile e-commerce, VR-Commerce, AI-based shopping, and more. Today Co-founder of Swipify
