More than half the population has a smartphone, tablet usage is growing and more than 20% of sales online are now going through mobile devices of one kind or another. So how do you ‘go mobile’?
By Paul Skeldon, mobile editor, eSeller and Internet Retailing
This article will explore
• How to make your site mobile
• Why it needs to be transactional
• How mobile is part of a bigger picture
• The need to make it social
The mobile phone – and increasingly the tablet – is slowly becoming the device of choice for consumers to access the internet whether they are out and about or sitting at home. Naturally, anyone involved in selling over the internet is aware of the need to cater for these mobile shoppers – yet it is one thing to know you have to do it, quite another when you look at how to actually make it happen.
Of course, the role of mobile in commerce is huge – I wrote a book about it – and there is much to drill down into, but for starters, let’s look at the three things any small e-tailer needs to think about when looking to develop a mobile strategy or to simply make sure that shoppers hitting their site on a mobile or tablet convert.
1) Make it work on different devices
It seems like stating the obvious, but if you are looking to tap into the exploding m-commerce market you need to make sure that you have the broadest reach possible. Many business’s first foray in to mobile commerce is to develop an iPhone app – often driven by the fact that the boss has an iPhone and uses apps. But this immediately cuts out a vast amount of your audience and make random discovery, SEO and all the other things that drive e-commerce, redundant.
By far the better approach to a first time foray into mobile is to simply re-render your website as an adaptive website that can look good – and more to the point be useful – across all manner of devices.
In fact, even among large retailers, the lack of a responsive website is telling. Recent research by Venda found that just one – Currys – of the top 50 retailers in the UK had a responsive website. Among small vendors this figure is probably even worse.
And its importance can’t be over stressed. A website for mobile is essential if you are to attract new business since it works with SEO. A mobile website is also the cheapest way to make your content and ‘experience’ work on all devices. It also means when you make updates you only have to do it once.
As Chris Thomas, Manager Director, Cloggs explains: “It’s increasingly obvious how a range of mobile devices are changing the way people shop online – in fact almost half of our traffic comes from a mobile or tablet device. Mobile browsing is often a customer’s first step when making a purchase, but a bad browsing experience can mean retailers losing customers at an early stage of the buying decision.
“Venda’s innovative RWD solution reduces this possibility and presents an opportunity for us to get ahead of the game, as we’re now one of a few top UK retailers that offer a responsive site. We’re already seeing around a 30 per cent improvement in our mobile conversion rates and the new responsive site will really allow us to start accessing the mobile traffic that is growing every day”.
So talk to your web hosting company or your designer – they can probably help you do this about how you take what you have online and make it work across all platforms.
2) Think about how mobile is used
While getting your website mobilized is key to making sure that you tap into growing number of consumers who are using mobile and tablets to trawl the web, there is a word of warning: think carefully about what aspects of your site you actually need on a mobile phone.
Mobile phones have small screens – which are also usually viewed portrait, rather than landscape (vertical rather than horizontal). Tablets have good screens, but they are typically smaller than a laptop. Smart watches have tiny screens. Google glasses are just ridiculous (so we won’t count those this time: give it a couple of years).
This means you have to look at not replicating your existing site, but looking at what elements of the site you need on mobile and how to best display those. Its often about what you leave out, rather than what you put in.
All mobile devices have slower processors than laptops and desktops and, when they are out and about or connected to a network operator network they are often subject to download limits and bandwidth constraints. All of this means that mobile versions of websites often need to be less rich in terms of graphics and content to keep the site looking good, while not taking ages to render or eating up consumers expensive data allowances. These are two things guaranteed not to illicit repeat business.
3) Make it transactional
While it may be sensible to leave some elements of your website out of the mobile version, one thing that you need to offer consumers hitting your website through mobile or tablet is the same ability to buy things when they are there as they get online with a PC.
You’d be surprised as to how many businesses develop a mobile version of their site and, fearful of security concerns and consumer reluctance to type in card details into a tiny keyboard have omitted the transactional part of their site entirely. This is clearly madness. Getting someone all the way to your site and then not letting them buy things is so counterproductive as to be, frankly, insane.
But that said you need to make the purchase and payment process as painless as possible. Abandonment rates on transactional mobile sites are frightening. Research by US payment validation company Jumio from earlier this year found that, while 68% of smartphone and tablet owners have attempted to make a purchase on their device, two-thirds (66%) failed to complete a transaction due to obstacles encountered during checkout.
These obstacles range from not being comfortable or feeling secure entering their credit card information to the checkout process being too difficult on their device. According to the research, 51% abandon their cart because they don’t feel confident in actually making the purchase, while 47% give up because the checkout process is perceived as too complex. Meanwhile, 23% more give up because the purchase doesn’t go through.
According to Fadi Shuman, Founder and CEO of Pod1 you can do some really simple things to stop people abandoning their mobile basket at the checkout. “Reduce payment friction: in other words make the process as easy as possible. Making the entry fields as large as possible is one crucial way to do this.
Also, remove distractions. Once a user is in the checkout process, they have obviously expressed a willingness to buy… anything that draws their attention anywhere other than the task at hand is bad. Don’t give people an excuse to drop out of the checkout process.”
4) Make it part of your whole strategy
It may sound dumb, but when looking at developing a mobile strategy, don’t look at it in isolation, but as part of the whole. For many years e-commerce was considered a separate channel – and often wholly separate business – to real world retail. Mobile has, initially at least, also been thought of in this silo-ed way.
But the modern consumer doesn’t think like this: they think homogenously. In many cases the mobile part of the purchase ‘journey’ is just a part of a process that involves research, discovery, price comparison, sharing and, hopefully, purchase.
But this journey can start on one device and take it all other touch points, from PC to mobile to store, before being closed on any one of these. And consumers expect the stages they take through this journey to be available across all platforms. So mobile has to be integrated into everything else that you do.
On a practical level, this can partially be achieved through responsive web design, but it really needs to form an integral part of the philosophy of your business.
5) Make it social
In 1726, Daniel Defoe observed the social element of the leisured classes window-shopping in London. Today, shopping is a leisure pursuit and there is no reason why this can’t be extended to mobile.
While much of the growth in m-retail is coming from people using mobile devices from the comfort of their sofa at home, many are also doing so from the bus home, as well as from the high street and within shops themselves. And the rapid rise in mobile social networking dovetails with this nicely.
They may be shopping online from a variety of locales, but the mobile consumer is chatting and sharing with their friends via Twitter, Facebook and the likes of Pinterest and even Google+.
And this is perhaps your greatest tool: let your own customers do the lion’s share of your marketing for you via their own social groups. Make your site mobile friendly and easy to use, make the check out process simple and secure – and if you have the budget, make mobile part of your whole e-commerce strategy – and your customers will start to wax lyrical about how great you are to their friends and social groups.
So make it easy to share anything and everything on your mobile site. In fact, this is really the watchword for all things mobile: ‘Make it simple to…’ Stick to this mantra and you can’t really go wrong.
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