Do you still consider mobile as a supplementary commerce medium? If yes, then there’s no doubt that you are losing out a lot of business to your competitors.
Advancements in mobile technology coupled with your customers’ ever increasing reliance on smartphones has led to a phenomenal rise in mobile transactions.
Therefore, it becomes highly crucial for you to craft an exceptional mobile experience for your eCommerce store visitors.
Here are some deadly mistakes that you must avoid while considering your mobile eCommerce website development or redesign.
1. Not considering responsive design
These days, having a responsive website is no more an option for your business, it’s rather an imperative! A responsive design allows you to bid farewell to the need of creating a separate mobile-friendly site. This is because a responsive website is capable of detecting your site visitor’s screen size and orientation and hence can change its layout accordingly.
Moreover, it also saves you from getting penalized by Google for having duplicate content as you need not have two different sites with same content now.
Find out more about what you are missing out by not having a responsive site by clicking here!
2. Cluttered homepage
Your homepage holds substantial potential for creating a lasting first impression on your website visitors. Usually homepage is the first thing that they see on your site and you need to make the most of this opportunity.
Our web design experts suggest that your homepage must be devoid of unnecessary things so that your visitors don’t walk away from your site. For instance, you must keep away from using too many fonts, images or texts to avoid giving a chaotic look to your homepage.
Furthermore, you would need to get creative in order to use the screen space that is fraction of the size of screens on desktops and laptops. In other words, you would have to convey the same information with less and absolute essential design elements.
3. Complicated navigation
Did you ever visit a site wherein links were hard to find and buttons were hardly visible? How would you describe that experience in one word? Frustrating, right!
Imagine your visitors come to your site to search for some products or information and the buttons are placed in wrong location, will they stay on your site?
Hence, it is of utmost importance to make your website navigation easy and intuitive with textual description for all the links and alt text for images.
Remember to condense your navigation to make it precise and easier for mobile customers to use. Getting your site designed by an experienced eCommerce development agency would definitely help you achieve a professional look for your website.
4. No guest checkout option
Guest checkout option enables your site visitors to make a purchase from your e-store without having to sign up for an account. Not having one could lead to cart abandonment as many customers don’t have the patience to fill-out a number of fields in a form.
To encourage customers to complete the checkout process you would need to make it as quick and painless as possible.
Mobile customers are always in a hurry and by saving time of your customers while they are on the go you are creating value for them which they would definitely love and become repeat visitors.
5. Asking too much information from users
In your eCommerce website how many pages your visitors are required to go through? How many forms they need to fill for registration?
Remember that eCommerce giants like Amazon have already raised the bar of customer expectation. Therefore, if you are not able to provide a streamlined experience to your visitors browsing via their smartphones and tablets then they are very likely to defect to your competitors.
Try to keep the forms concise in order to encourage site visitors to complete checkout forms and also to boost conversions. You know full well that tapping and typing via touchscreen of smartphones is very cumbersome indeed.
6. Not having proper call-to-action
Keep your call-to-action (CTA) bold, specific and above the fold. Try to make conversion path frictionless for your mobile users and consider adding quick buy buttons in order to minimize the number of clicks to checkout.
Why not offer a CTA like “Add to basket” option from the search results page? This will save lot of tapping hassles and shorten the path for your mobile customers.
Try to enforce urgency on your customers and encourage them to take your desired action by tapping on the “Buy Now” or “Add to cart” button.
Remember user experience is a vital factor that would determine how long your customers would stay on your site. Therefore, make it a point to make the CTA button thumb-friendly, in other words, bigger and with colours that contrasts with the background.
7. Logo not linked to homepage
Have you ever tried to go back to the homepage by tapping the logo placed in the top-left of a mobile page? How would it feel if it doesn’t work or the link is not available?
Too many taps required to perform a single action is truly frustrating for a mobile user.
If you don’t want to make your customers feel the same, then link your logo to your home page without fail. Visitors would love this experience if they can go back to your home page with just a single tap.
8. Inconsistent user interface
Anything in excess has a deleterious effect and the same holds good for web design. Too many elements or over-creativity resulting into different designs for every single page within a website could be confusing and annoying.
Your website visitors should be able to relate and connect with your website. No matter how appealing your site is, if the overall appearance is inconsistent then it would confuse your customers and deter them from connecting with your brand.
Hence, if you want to create great user experience then your design must be customer centric and this is better echoed by the words of Dana Chisnell:
“Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users.”
9. Unstructured and irrelevant content
Your website content plays a pivotal role in driving traffic to your site. How well your content is structured determines how successful your site becomes. Yes! Google algorithms can crawl easily through a structured content.
Moreover, putting appropriate titles, headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, bullets and keywords can help your mobile users to skim through your pages within no time. They would appreciate that and would come back to your site for more relevant stuffs.
Featuring relevant, consistent, structured and fresh content on your site can help you get a better search engine ranking which is highly significant for your business.
Also keep in mind to add sufficient white space between your text and images by adding proper margins.
10. Ignoring testing
Your website redesign is complete now and you have got an amazing mobile eCommerce site developed. However, failing to test it over and over on multiple devices before launch could be damaging for the health of your site.
Our eCommerce development experts always make sure to test accessibility, functionalities, responsiveness, etc. so that if there is any issue it can be addressed and fixed prior to launch.
Now it’s your turn
Is your eCommerce website performs well in mobile devices? Remember not to commit the aforementioned mistakes while redesigning your eCommerce website. You can also talk with our experts and get cost-effective solutions.
Would you like to help our readers with some more common mistakes? Please be the first to let us know by leaving your comments below.
