Mobile Commerce Trends in 2017

A mobile phone is something that has become shopping in today’s world. With rising reliability on mobile phones by consumers, there has been a greater opportunity for the retailers for stepping ahead from e-commerce to m-commerce, i.e. mobile commerce trends.

The billions of global users of mobile devices also now form a significant number of potential customers to advertise and sell your products. Retailers best effort was to reach those customers through mobile versions of their sites; but is that it? Innovations give rise to greater innovations, hence retailers need to step up their game and provide something different than a mobile version of their website with a superior user experience that would be different from a desktop or a mobile browser site.

For retailers to beat their competitors in 2016, there can be various innovative m-commerce trends and strategies that can be incorporated.

1. Simple interface: As we all have experienced, mobile shopping is at its best when the focus is left on the products alone. A simple interface is one of the first mobile commerce trends any retailer should focus on. The customer should be given a clutter-free interface to easily purchase the products they like. The traditional ‘add to cart’ and ‘path to purchase’ is now obsolete and doesn’t work on Phones. The excess navigation just slows down the user and leads to abandoned carts. In fact, why have a cart at all?

Apps should save the user credit card and shipping address just like Uber. The user should be allowed to navigate through the wide range of products freely without excess navigations, unnecessary promotions or irrelevant information and just be forwarded to a confirmation page where one click lets him place the order.

2. Original features: Majority of the m-commerce apps we see have the same boring designs with wide range of products, which turn out to be mind boggling and confusing for the users. Stepping into the innovative era, it’s impressive if retailers incorporate mobile commerce trends which include original unique features in their apps.

For instance, if you like a dress or some accessory you see in a magazine you just take a picture and upload it on the app to get similar products. Few retailers have even utilized the voice recognition feature in smart phones to enable voice input search of products. Consider, the mobile site of Warby Palker, where a tilt of the device changes the picture slides without you having to click on the small dots or the different images given to view products from different angles.

On the other side, staying a step ahead, apps like Sephora Virtual Artist, have used facial recognition software allowing users to test lip products and purchase in the app itself. Sites which have physical stores, can also enable GPS trackers to track nearby stores for the customers to drop in or just add the “click and collect” option which would help customers confirm on a product with one click and collect it from any nearby store.

3. Provide large quality product photos: Another mobile commerce trend that desperately needs to happen this year is apps with large optimized product images. Checking out products with small thumbnails on a page becomes pretty much tedious for a user to click on each product to get a bigger view. Sticking to lesser number of photos in a screen with bigger views helps the user scroll through various products without tiring his fingers moving back and forth to see stuff they do not like. So, if you have more than 4 product photos at once, your app is a fail.

4. One Click and buy easy payment: Hovering over a wide range of products and finally choosing something after a mind boggling experience, what comes is the payment. Again here, getting forwarded to various pages, inputting the same information each time or finally opting for a not so desirable payment option already drives down the user’s wish to use the app the next time.

Mobile wallets are the new mobile commerce trend as a speedy payment option which can be seen as a digital form of the traditional wallet, holding digital information of credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Various sites have switched to options which speed up the payment, offering multiple payment methods or their own payment wallet just like Wal-Mart which recently launched its own payment wallet, Wal-Mart pay. Whereas, Target according to Reuters, is planning to develop its own mobile wallet as well.

So as you see, most shopping Apps are just a smaller version of their website. No wonder that market trends show that smart phone add to cart and conversion rates are still behind desktop’s.

With these new mobile commerce trends to follow, and many more as much as your innovative ideas can improvise, you can build up your user friendly m-commerce app. After all, your App isn’t just a mobile version of your website. You need to give users a unique shopping experience.