How to Improve Your Mobile Shopping Experience

How to Win Over Mobile Consumers

Did you know that even when hundreds of other e-commerce stores offer the same products and services, you can still penetrate the market, make sales, and scale your business?

How is that even possible?

We now live in a world where winning over customers and earning their trust has less to do with what you’re selling and more with the kind of experience you provide them. 

Customer experience is at the heart of your success. It’s the key to differentiating yourself from competitors and increasing your customer base. 

You want to wow your target audience and provide them with the ultimate mobile shopping experience unique to your brand. This experience should be from the time they discover your e-commerce store, browsing your products and making a purchase, to offering post-purchase support.  

Remember, 61% of customers won’t hesitate to switch to a competitor after a single bad experience with your brand. So, every interaction matters.  

With more people browsing on mobile devices than desktops, having a mobile-friendly website opens a world for your customer potential. More people will see your website, meaning you’ll get more customers. Thus, more sales as an e-commerce business.

Optimizing the Shopping Experience

Optimizing your mobile shopping experience doesn’t only mean complying with the search engines’ requirements. It also means providing the best navigation experience for your visitors: Leading them through to the basket without disruptions.

So, it’s a win-win situation: your business does everything to ensure a sale and the customer has a pleasant experience (best way to convince them to come back, right?). 

This point is where the value of optimizing your e-commerce for search engines comes in. Google has a mobile-first approach, which means that the search engine uses the mobile version of your e-commerce site to decide on your ranking and index the page.

Google always considers visitors first and decides on ranking based on the value and page experience your e-commerce business provides. That’s why you should always focus on customer-first when optimizing your e-commerce for better search results. Creating an optimized and seamless experience will positively impact your search results and lead customers to check out without disruptions.

Targeting Mobile Consumers

Mobiles have become a pivotal part of the shopping experience. With each year, the statistics favoring mobile shopping increase, further underlining the importance of configuring an online store for mobile shopping.

But why is mobile such an essential aspect of shopping online? Here, we examine the power of mobile and why you must optimize your online store for multiple devices.

Statista’s Market Insights states that mobile e-commerce sales reached $2.2 trillion in 2023, making up 60 percent of all e-commerce sales worldwide. The share of mobile e-commerce in all e-commerce has been steadily climbing, up from just 56 percent in 2018 to an expected 62 percent in 2027.

To run a successful e-commerce store, you must embrace mobile solutions and give customers more flexibility about the devices they use to buy items. Mobile is no longer a nice-to-have feature; it’s vital to any successful e-commerce store. 

Improvements in technology have given consumers more access at a faster rate. The result is an on-demand economy where shoppers can purchase at home or on the go with just a few clicks. 

29% of internet users make an e-commerce transaction on their phones at least once a week.

Dash App

Whether riding public transport, waiting for an appointment, or on a lunch break, people turn to their mobiles in droves and scroll social media, read news websites, or browse their favorite online stores.

Just like consumers expect more flexibility in paying for items, they also want a seamless shopping experience, no matter the device they browse. Offering fluent digital shopping is more than a trend – it’s an expectation.

One of the more apparent benefits of mobile shopping is the ability to extend reach. As a merchant, you aren’t solely relying on people buying products and services from their homes or work. Having a fully mobile-optimized website puts your business in more places.

The possibilities are endless, and shoppers can make a quick purchase while waiting for a plane to take off before switching to Airplane Mode. Or they purchase on the platform before the subway arrives or during the train ride home. 

How Mobile-First SEO Benefits Online Stores

Mobile phones generate most digital commerce website visits worldwide, creating the most significant number of orders. As of the first quarter of 2023, smartphones accounted for approximately 74 percent of retail site traffic worldwide and generated 63 percent of online shopping orders. Therefore, merchants face a significant opportunity to get mobile-ready.

Ranking high on search engines is no easy task. But offering a fluid mobile experience for shoppers can aid efforts and get your website in Google’s good books, and consumers can shop at your store from anywhere while having more places to find you.

Being able to sell from more locations leads to higher conversions. You’re no longer relying solely on a shopper using their desktop to make a purchase and can add another way for them to buy products and services. 

Since July 2022, Google’s algorithm prioritizes mobile sites and ranks websites mobile-first. This update means that the Googlebot crawls and indexes your web pages based on how they render on a mobile device.

So, if your web pages aren’t mobile-first, you won’t rank highly. By not having a great mobile site, you risk falling down the ranks in search engine results and losing out to competitors paying attention to their mobile offering.

What Do Consumers Expect from Mobile Shopping?

Customer experience is vital to any online shopping scenario. Shopping behaviors dictate these experiences, and if you’re paying attention to your bottom line, you must consider a few key aspects.

1. Ultra-Responsive Mobile Site Design

Despite the surge in the popularity of mobile shopping, customers still face frustrating barriers. One survey led by Dynamic Yield found that 67% of users said that “pages and links being too small to click on” impeded mobile shopping.

Another 36% of users cited “difficulty finding what they’re looking for” as an obstacle to shopping on their mobiles. 

Plus, with 63% of Google organic search results coming from a mobile device, search engines penalize sites that don’t deliver seamless mobile shopping experiences. For example, Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing considers a site’s mobile experience when determining where each page should rank—even if the searcher loads it on a desktop.

Are you concerned about your mobile loading times? Google PageSpeed Insights is the perfect starting point. It’ll show average loading times across mobile devices, with recommendations for fixing them.

To stand out in a crowded marketplace, brands must prioritize mobile-friendly designs that help customers find what they want.

2. Omnichannel Experience

Allow your customers to shop any way they choose. That usually means a blended, omnichannel approach from discovery to purchase. Your customer may start in a brick-and-mortar store window shopping for their next couch, but the transaction may occur on a tablet as they settle in for the night streaming their favorite show.

Data shows that people rely on their mobile phones for in-store shopping. Half of people use their mobile device to research a product; another 27% have purchased it from their mobile device while visiting a brick-and-mortar store.

Work to combine this online-to-offline (and back again) shopping experience with click-to-mortar incentives. They align your in-store experience with mobile shopping using technology:

• QR codes 
• Mobile-specific comparison pages
• Geo-fenced SMS coupons

Many companies are also turning to mobile-enabled in-store checkouts and mobile wallets for customers who have been pointed to their store by a mobile device. Long lines in-store can be a significant drag. Mobile point-of-sale (POS) devices like PayPal or Square offer an easy-to-use and cost-effective mobile ticketing solution.

What that means for you is a consistently branded, fully optimized experience across all platforms. From the store to smartphone to laptop, the experience is seamless.

3. User-Friendly Shopping Interface

One of the critical detractors for an abandoned cart is always a clean interface with the shopping cart in clear view. One of the user interface design champions is Amazon. The uncluttered layout and icons (including a shopping cart) guide users’ shopping journey from search to checkout.

An intelligent, clutter-free, user-friendly UI/UX strategy will increase a shopper’s screen time. More screen time results in more sales and higher ROI (return on investment). A Forrester study revealed that good UI can improve a website’s conversions by 200%, and good UX can increase conversions by 400%.

By providing an easy-to-navigate website, user-friendly product descriptions, and helpful online customer service, businesses and developers of e-commerce stores can ensure that customers have a positive mobile shopping experience.

4. Immersive Experiences 

One of the most exciting developments in online shopping has been pairing smartphones with smart data capture capabilities, such as computer vision and augmented reality. This development has started to evolve shopping experiences further and helps retailers transform the in-store experience from a transactional to an experiential one for their customers.

This new immersive experience is powered by visual configurator tools widely offered on websites for e-commerce purchases such as furniture. These augmented reality apps allow consumers to place a desk or chair in a room and interact with an item. This ability is rapidly becoming a win for consumers and merchants alike.

5. Hybrid Shopping Options

Mobile e-commerce offers consumers the freedom to shop from their preferred location. For modern consumers, that means purchasing an item online while within the walls of a brick-and-mortar store.

This ability is an example of multichannel retail, an area of commerce that lends itself to the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey, particularly when making larger purchases.

With multichannel browsing and buying, customers can inspect a product’s quality and features without feeling pressured to purchase it immediately.

When the timing feels right, they can visit the store’s mobile app and order the product in minutes. Alternatively, browsing online and buying in-store lets shoppers compare and narrow down products.

In this instance, e-commerce market competition, product details, and reviews drive decisions. When consumers are ready to commit to a product, they can use online stock lists and store locators to purchase a product in-store that same day, free of shipping costs.

6. Robust Search Options

The more extensive your product catalog, the more critical site search is to your ecommerce success. While it’s rare to find an ecommerce site without a search box, it happens, even among some of the most famous brands.

Search result usability is also essential. Customers expect filtered navigation to further refine results by attributes that are meaningful to them (category, price, star ratings, color, size, etc.). Killer search result pages provide filters, the ability to sort results, prices, stock availability, large thumbnail images, product description snippets, and add-to-cart/add-to-wish list buttons.

7. Voice Search 

Voice assistants and smart speakers like Google’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have been around since 2011. Steadily growing in popularity over the years, the way people use voice search is shifting.

Initially, people used voice assistants to ask weather-related questions, give location directions, or play music. But voice search has now filtered into the e-commerce market.

According to Demand Sage, 4.2 billion voice assistants are in use as of 2023. This number will reach 8.4 billion by 2024. Voice search assistants answer 93.7% of search queries on average. More than 1 billion voice searches take place every month.

According to Statista, the total worldwide transaction value of e-commerce purchases made through voice assistants is expected to rise from 4.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2021 to 19.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. This is more than 400 percent growth in just two years, caused by the increasing opportunities for voice assistants to purchase items, primarily through smartphones and smart devices in the home.

How are people using voice search to shop online? Shoppers often use voice search before, during, and after purchasing.

In addition, most (51%) shoppers use voice search during the research phase, and another 36% use voice search to add products to their shopping lists.

Customers also use voice search to track packages, provide feedback and reorder items.

8. Local Search

Optimizing your online store for local search is crucial for businesses with a physical presence or local customer base. Many mobile users are looking for companies and products in their local area, so optimizing your website for local search is essential.

Local search can include on-page optimizations such as location-specific keywords in your content, ensuring your business information is up-to-date and consistent across all platforms, and using schema markup to help search engines understand your business’s location and offerings.

By optimizing for local search, you can help ensure that your business is visible to potential customers in your area who are searching for your products or services.

9. Chatbots Shoppers

Many mobile consumers prefer the ease of contacting a chatbot to resolve cart or order issues versus making a time-consuming live call and waiting in the dreaded call queue or the slower pace of waiting on an email inquiry response.

E-commerce brands leaning into chatbots are following their customers’ preferences. 80% of consumers have had a conversation with a chatbot. More than half say that chatbots helped them outside standard customer service hours. Customers find them so helpful that in 2027 global chatbot revenue will exceed $454 million.

Aside from customer support, product suggestions are a chatbot use case to guide your customer toward purchase, much like a personal shopper. You may also see applications in weather, online banking, news, or even pizza ordering.

Chat is good for business. Research shows sales activity transacted through chatbots, digital voice assistants, and messaging is expected to rise from $41 billion in 2021 to $290 billion by 2025, according to Juniper Research.

10. Personalization

With so much market competition, brands must differentiate themselves with unique experiences. With the ability to curate personal collections and browse influencer content, shoppers are enticed by product suggestions tailored to their style.

A growing demand for personalized shopping, often augmented by artificial intelligence and tied to social media, is highly sought after among online shoppers.

And while many marketers are quickly delving into mobile, many are not thinking about creating relevant and personalized experiences.

Although it is wise to see who their target audience is, brands and retailers focus too much on getting their mobile campaign out there rather than seeing if it would attract their ideal demographic.

Instead, marketers should use mobile to deliver relevant offers based on personal preferences, location, and other very personal real-time data and link responses to actual transactions.

If done right, this will help brands and retailers stand out.

For instance, if a consumer buys a dress via a mobile site, the company can offer that customer shoes that go with the dress, which will not only help drive more sales but have consumers coming back for a tailored shopping experience.

11. Fast Page Load Speed

Think about yourself and your customer: what is the first thing you notice when visiting an e-commerce site? If you have to wait for 10 seconds until the online store loads, you might change your mind and check out other e-commerce sites instead. Therefore, you need to optimize your page speed.

When a user clicks through to your site on a mobile device and a desktop website loads, it will inevitably take much longer to respond than one optimized for mobile. Just think of all the elements that will need to load!

82% of consumers say slow page speeds impact their purchasing decisions.

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You can use tools like Pagespeed Insights or Lighthouse to identify issues, such as page speed, and get tips on improving your user experiences on both – mobile and desktop. Your site should load in up to 4 seconds; otherwise, the risk of losing the visitor increases.

Time is money for e-commerce, and potential customers will abandon your site if it doesn’t load quickly enough. You have seconds to impress a shopper once they arrive at your location. 40% of shoppers won’t wait more than 3 seconds before abandoning an e-commerce site.

12. One-Click Ordering 

Not to be melodramatic, but mobile e-commerce lies or dies at the checkout. If only a tiny percentage of your online sales come from mobile users, you may need to refine your checkout process.

How? By following the golden rule: less is more.

Some 17% of people will abandon their online cart if the checkout process feels too long or complicated. Having to re-enter basic details like credit card numbers (30%) and shipping details (25%) causes mobile shoppers to head for the exit button.

In 2023, retail brands that want to encourage more mobile shoppers to complete their purchases must prioritize fast and easy one-tap checkout. Shoppers should be able to hit the Buy button without filling in endless form fields.

Ideally, once users enter your mobile-checkout process, they should be presented with mobile-first payment options that enable them to purchase in a single click. You can do this through:

• Google Pay
• Apple Pay
• Android Pay
• PayPal
• Amazon Pay
• Ali Pay

Include only those options that are most popular among your existing customer base. But remember: this doesn’t mean you should skip traditional logins and credit cards as long as those methods have proven attractive to mobile shoppers.

13. Simplified Checkout

The checkout process can be tedious enough with entering multiple fields on a smaller smartphone screen. It’s frustrating to get so close to the “place order” finish line and then have the burden of a forced account sign-up. It most likely results in an abandoned cart.

According to Accenture, 87% of online shoppers abandon their carts if checkout is complex, and 55% leave the retailer entirely. Consumers expect the checkout experience to be as simple and frictionless as possible.

Consumers expect the checkout experience to be as simple and frictionless as possible. This expectation means that consumers look for checkout functions such as:

• Automatic payment population.
• One-click checkout options.
• Guest checkout options.
• Precise, accurate total costs.

To provide the simple and convenient checkout experience consumers demand, digital sellers can leverage technology integrations to make checkout almost as easy as the rest of the shopping journey.

Simplifying checkout can take many forms, depending on your business. Fortunately, a range of technology options and integrations are available to make checkout as simple as possible for convenient, accurate purchases.

14. Multiple Payment Methods

Allow customers to pay with any method they choose. Alternative payment options like digital wallet options from Apple, Google, or Samsung are widely accepted and favored for their touchless function.

A growing trend in mobile payment is the BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) option from vendors like PayPal, Klarna, and other Buy Now, Pay Later apps. BNPL provides a broader payment solution for those on a budget who seek big-ticket items.

Of course, this does not mean online retailers should neglect traditional payment options, such as credit cards.

The Future of the Mobile Shopping Experience

Providing a holistic mobile shopping experience is no longer a luxury for brands. Consumers expect this from every brand they choose to do business with, and if a brand doesn’t deliver, they will find one that can.

Google research indicates that 64% of smartphone users expect a site to load in 4 seconds or less, 40% of consumers have turned to a competitor for a better mobile experience, and 1 in 4 shoppers abandon their carts if a site’s navigation is too complex.

The dependency on mobile phones to shop for products and services will only increase. As a result, merchants need to be ahead of the curve with an online store that switches between mobile and desktop without a hitch and offers customers a polished mobile shopping experience no matter the devices they choose for their online shopping.

Increased flexibility and the opportunity to purchase with their chosen device leads to higher customer satisfaction. A happy shopper is also likelier to leave a positive review, showcasing their satisfaction while helping boost the business’s reputation.

They will also continue using your online store to buy products and services, thus becoming a regular customer. Mobile-friendly online stores ultimately help build credibility and trust with customers, as they get an optimized mobile shopping experience no matter where they’re using the site. We are here to help!

Do You Need to Provide a Better Mobile Experience?

Are you selling products online and need to provide a better shopping experience for mobile consumers? Our professional e-commerce designers will be happy to help you with this. But first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your ecommerce web design needs, reach out to us! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.

And if you are unsure how to improve your mobile shopping experience, let’s talk! We will listen to you, answer your questions, and help you meet the expectations of demanding mobile consumers!

Are You Meeting Mobile Consumer Expectations?

Do you have anything to add to our tips for providing a better mobile shopping experience? Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our post with your audience!

For more content relevant to your business or product brand – check out the range of articles on our web design blog. (This one, explaining how fixing ecommerce design mistakes increases sales, is an excellent place to start!)

Thank you! We appreciate your help ending bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita