Advanced Mobile Optimisation Tips for eCommerce Websites

Align your marketing campaigns to mobile

Did you know that 47% of people prefer using mobile to check their email over desktop, and when it comes down to mobile v tablets, 81% prefer to open their emails on their smartphones? When planning email campaigns, you need to cater to the growing number of users accessing them on their phones. Direct them to a responsive and accessible landing page that supports your email campaign.

Mobile SEO

Now more than ever, it’s important for your eCommerce site to be optimised and ready for Google’s mobile-first indexing. This summer they announced that all new sites previously unknown to Google search engines will be indexed mobile-first.

Things you can focus on when assessing and improving your mobile SEO are:

• Site speed: Mobile users are all about convenience and if your site isn’t loading in an acceptable time frame, you need to improve on this.
• Page titles and meta descriptions: There’s less space on mobile screens for viewing these fields so keep these short and sweet.
• Consider local search for stores: If you’re a store wanting to be discovered by locals, then optimising for local search is a great way to get found – plus, this is something people will most likely be searching for using their mobiles.

Focus on product list pages

A key feature of any successful eCommerce site is easy to use product list pages, and yet, they’re often the pages on mobile that need the most attention. Smaller screens often make it more difficult for users to navigate them properly and find all the information they need to make buying decisions.

To optimise your eCommerce site for mobile, and to save users clicking through to irrelevant products, include key information in product names on the product list page. You’ll be able to play around with layouts here so you can include brand, make and model, year, etc where necessary.

You also need to decide how to display products on the list page when optimising for mobile eCommerce. For products that rely more on visual selling points, like clothing and shoes, for example, you’ll want to make the image bigger and text slightly smaller. However, with technology items where you’ll need to include more specification based product names, you’ll want the display to be more text-heavy with smaller images.

Having filtering options helps the user eliminate unnecessary products and hone in on what they really want, making the buying process even more efficient. Use an easy to locate filter included in a drop-down menu on the list page. Once a user selects their chosen filters, display these at the top so as to ensure there’s no confusion as to whether they’re applied.

With mobile, many people will be browsing whilst on the go and will want to save items for buying at a later stage. By allowing users to add products to a favourites section, or wishlist, you’re maximising the chance of conversion as they can easily pick up where they left off on a different platform. Feeding into the omnichannel approach to your eCommerce strategy – something that’s super important to get right!

Easy Social Sharing

A great way to increase engagement on your site, especially mobile, is through optimising your social sharing abilities on products. Asos do this really well, with abilities to share product pages via WhatsApp, SMS, and social media platforms.

Product pages

Once you’ve attracted the customer to the product page from your awesome listings page, you’ll need to make sure this is optimised for mobile too. Product descriptions are main players in enticing conversions from customers, you can use these snippets of text to really sell your product. However, try to minimise the amount of information you include here on such a small page when optimising for mobile.

Collapse your product descriptions and information into navigable sections for users to click on to expand and interact with how they want to. This is much better than keeping them scrolling through snippets of content they may find less interesting or relevant to their specific needs.

Offer a quick checkout process

If people are looking to purchase via a mobile device, they’re going to want a quick and hassle-free checkout process – convenience is key! A high checkout abandonment rate isn’t something a retailer like yourself wants to see. Making sure this experience is as seamless as possible for the user is ultimately going to lead to more sales.

There’s nothing more annoying than inputting one piece of information incorrectly on a form, to go back and find all the other details have vanished. Make sure your form captures the user’s text so if things go awry – chunky thumb alert – they can simply amend the one piece of incorrect information and carry on with the checkout process.

Faster payment options like PayPal, digital wallets and Apple Pay, for example, speed up the process for those buying on the go – perfect for mobile users. Amazon’s 1-click payment options for those with accounts are a great tactic to employ for fast and sure mobile conversions.

Ability to review an order

Make sure that users can review their order before placing it when optimising for mobile in eCommerce. Things like their personal details, delivery, card and payment information, and the items ordered. This will help eliminate any errors in the order process.

Prepopulate billing and shipping address forms where you can. Having the ability to select ‘shipping the same as billing’ is a great way to curb time, offering the chance to edit if the two addresses are different. No one wants to be messing around with fiddly details like this when shopping on mobile!

To scroll or not to scroll?

You may think putting a cap on scrolling is counter-intuitive (after all, you want to show off as many products as possible, right?), but in fact, giving buyers more options with endless scrolling can actually result in a lower conversion rate. Using a call to action button like “load more” while displaying a maximum number of products at one time will prompt buyers into a more thought-led browsing session rather than mindless scrolling.

With this, you also need to make sure that when a user goes back to the original list from viewing a product they’re able to go back to where they were – there’s nothing worse than going back to the start after being 7 pages in!