4 Effective Tips to Optimize Your Mobile E-commerce Conversion Rates

The e-commerce industry has seen phenomenal growth over the years and worldwide e-commerce sales is estimated to reach 2.290 trillion this year, according to1 eMarketer. Being an e-commerce development company we have been empowering businesses to get an edge over competition with state-of-the-art e-commerce solutions.

However, currently many e-commerce websites are facing with a common issue, that is, they are getting heavy traffic from mobile users but their conversion rates are low since most of them are not completing purchase via mobile devices.

Before we set on our quest to answer the question of “How to improve e-commerce conversion rates for mobile devices?” let’s take a look at the reasons for desktop still dominating conversion rates.

Why desktop conversion rates surpass mobile?

In spite of the fact that the number of mobile users has been increasing exponentially over the years, mobile traffic catching up or even surpassing desktop traffic, mobile conversions are still lagging behind than desktop conversions.

Let’s find out the reasons that make desktop computing platform more intuitive for users and why they prefer using this to complete their purchases:

• Pages and assets usually load quickly as desktop internet connectivity tend to be strong.
• Main menu, with multiple category options, being large and prominent is easily accessible.
• Search bars are often robust and prominent; thus rendering seamless experience.
• Product category feeds with multiple products are clearly visible, all at once or with advanced filter options.
• Offers large and detailed view of product images.

As a matter of fact, e-commerce developers have more experience creating polished shopping experiences for desktop platform as their target audience knows what to expect. Even with a little knowledge of how to operate a computer they can easily access an e-commerce website via desktop.

Moreover, stable internet connectivity to desktops account for quicker load times which in turn leads to the increase in sales conversions.

Besides, space is not a constraint on a desktop device; UI designers can get away with a larger canvas to work with. This means more menus; larger images and more products would lead to enhanced user experience.

Here are some proven tips from our team of e-commerce development experts to improve mobile e-commerce conversion rates:

#1 Prioritize website performance

You must be well aware of this fact that while browsing via mobile device slow load speed is truly frustrating. Google Double Click data reveals that 53 percent mobile users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

As per the deep neural network of Google, which has 90 percent prediction accuracy, a page takes one second to seven seconds to load then the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 113 percent.

These figures are more than enough to highlight the importance of speed if you want to improve conversions on mobile devices.

Therefore, if you want to reduce bounce rates and witness a lot of conversions on your site then work on improving your load speed as it is highly crucial to improving mobile e-commerce conversion rates.

Consider these following tips to boost website performance:

Reduce server response time

Your page would take longer to load if your server is taking long to respond to a request. It should take less than 200 milliseconds to respond to a request ideally. To minimize the server response time you can try these two things:

(1) Enhance the configuration of your web server; or

(2) Try to improve the quality of web hosting service you are currently using.

Use GZip compression to reduce file size

Large files would obviously take longer to be transmitted to the browser; hence in order to ensure that your site loads faster you have to reduce the size of files. You can try gzip compression to minimize the size of your files, especially images.

Avoid redirects

Often page load speed is low due to redirects as they consume precious milliseconds. Therefore, try to avoid them to give your site speed a significant boost. You can first analyze the number of redirects and then try minimizing them.

#2 Polish mobile user experience

If you could deliver great user experience on mobile devices then m-commerce conversions could improve. This involves ensuring that users can navigate through your site effortlessly, find the items they are looking for easily, and complete the checkout process seamlessly.

As discussed above a fast loading site would definitely improve the user experience, however, there are other aspects also which contributes to good user experience and they are as follows.

Simplify your navigation

Your mobile users would thank you for offering them seamless navigation and helping them find easily whatever they are looking for. Make sure to arrange all the page elements neatly so that users can browse through them in a systematic manner.

You can consider displaying the product image in a page prominently followed by pricing and clearly visible CTA button. For more info users can scroll down and see the product description. Further down they can view images of the product from other angles.

Ensure better readability

As mobile screens are smaller make it a point to keep the page clutter-free. Also make sure that your copy is legible and customers can read it properly. Avoid using fonts that are too small and require zooming to be read.

The font colour must clearly contrast with the background colour for ensuring easy readability. Remember not to use more than three types of fonts.

Furthermore, for better readability, see that the texts are aligned properly – central align short bits of texts and left align larger chunks of texts.

#3 Strong tactile cues for effective interactivity

By providing tactile response on your e-commerce site you can improve user experience and interactivity too. A visual cue while an item is added to their cart lets them know that the product has been successfully added to the cart.

When they are completing forms, visual indicators showing that those fields are valid would ensure faster form filling and clear indication on receiving order would also improve order accuracy.

Although, tactile response is important across all the devices, however, it is indispensable for ensuring mobile conversions. In flaky networks an action might fail because of dropped network connection, tactile cues enables users to understand if that happened and decide if they should try submitting order once again.

#4 Create seamless checkout experience

As per Facebook IQ report 26 percent of shoppers switch to desktops to complete their purchases because they find it awkward to enter personal data on mobile devices. This infers that it is highly important for you to optimize the checkout process and here are some tips:

Keep checkout pages short and precise

Long checkout pages might intimidate some shoppers as they find them very inconvenient to navigate on mobile devices. You can consider breaking down long pages into multiple pages which can be availed by the “Next” button.

Moreover, providing a progress indicator can enhance user experience as they would come to know how long the path to checkout is going to take and how many steps are involved.

Minimize fields in the form

Your users would appreciate if you could keep the process of purchase as simple as possible for them. Try to reduce the amount of information they need to enter in order to complete a purchase.

Never forget to offer them an option to register by using their social media account and create seamless checkout experience for your customers.

Perform A/B tests for optimizing CTA button

CTA button optimization is highly crucial in improving m-commerce conversions. Therefore, create different versions of your CTA button by introducing minor changes and test one change at a time. By testing A and B version of your button would come to know which version was more successful.

Finally!

The aforementioned tips would surely help you improve e-commerce conversions among your mobile audience. How do you increase your mobile e-commerce conversion rates? How do you ensure that the shopping experience of your mobile audience is frictionless?  We would love to hear from you; please leave your comments below and be the first to enlighten our readers by your insights.