Here’s What Retailers Need To Know About Mobile Sales If They Want To Be Successful
As the average online shopper begins to favor mobile over desktop, we need to rethink how to create the best mobile online shopping experience.
Right now, the industry consensus is that we should be working toward the same objective we do when curating a desktop online shopping experience: recreate the in-store experience. But as the founder and CEO of SellUp, an email marketing company, I think the e-commerce industry is getting it wrong.
We should be working to create two distinctly different online shopping experiences on mobile and desktop.
That’s because I believe online shoppers want two different things from mobile online shopping and desktop online shopping. As e-commerce has exploded in recent years, the industry has done a great job of creating an online shopping experience that reflects the in-store experience on desktop — and people like that.
But that’s not what they want when shopping online on their smartphones.
When people are shopping online on their phone, they want a purely transactional experience.
They don’t want to struggle through awkward navigational features, tiny item filters, and lengthy order processes — they want a quick, seamless, ideally one-click purchasing experience.
Of course, anyone who has tried to shop online on their smartphone has clicked the wrong tiny little link, then clicked back only to click the wrong link again. Many have been personally victimized by a half-cut-off webpage that won’t scroll over to the other half, or have bought two external hard drives when they only needed one, because they didn’t notice the tiny little digit next to “quantity” said “2.”
The truth is this: Mobile retail websites — even responsive sites, which adjust to a screen’s size — are still finicky, awkward, and frustrating.
So if someone is looking to browse around, strolling the virtual aisles of an online store via item filters and section tabs, they’re going to sit down at a desktop.
They’re not going to try doing that on their iPhone 6s.
We need to curate a new type of mobile shopping experience.
One with the primary objective of eliminating barriers to purchase.
Of course, this isn’t an entirely original idea. This was exactly the primary focus of early Amazon: never obstruct the purchase process. Require as few clicks as possible to complete a transaction. Or, in other words, create the most direct path to conversion.
So when a potential customer has to switch from their phone to a desktop just to complete a purchase because they can’t figure out how on your mobile site, you’re doing it wrong. That’s an incredibly indirect path. Most of the time, they’ll simply say “forget it” before bothering to go through the trouble.
In fact, I’ve witnessed a particular retailer see a 30% increase in mobile traffic this year while somehow managing to see a decrease in mobile sales. Needless to say, there’s something wrong with their mobile site. Your mobile site should be creating the most direct path to conversion, above all else.
If it’s not, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
But when you do, know that curating a seamless mobile shopping experience doesn’t mean you should aim to create a simple, feature-less experience.
There are many opportunities to create engaging mobile-focused offers and promotions.
Think about the top mobile e-commerce companies: Groupon, Gilt, Amazon (obviously). They all have unique features that work well for them. These features probably only work for their respective particular business models.
Amazon’s advantage is one-click purchasing. You could be sitting on your couch, drop and break your favorite The Office-inspired “World’s Best Boss” mug, then get really sad for three seconds before realizing you can order a new one on Amazon in two.
Gilt and Groupon both run endless, overwhelming in-app and email marketing promotions. That’s their thing. It drives lots of revenue for them — though promoting that frequently may not work for every online retailer.
The point is that mobile online retailers need to find their “thing.” In many cases, that thing is curating easily-accessible, mobile-friendly website sections. That creates the opportunity to drive traffic directly to those particular sections — eliminating the consumer’s need to navigate much — with email marketing.
For example, they can send their email list a promo with big (enough so thumbs don’t click the wrong link) “Shop This Hot Brand,” or “Shop Our Best-Selling Shoes Now” button links.
The e-commerce industry is still figuring out how to create an optimal mobile online shopping experience. We still need to determine exactly what people want when shopping on their smartphones and tablets. But it’s absolutely vital that we do.
Why is it so important we get this right?
Because the future of e-commerce depends on it.
Anyone who has checked their website traffic sources in the past few years knows that mobile is king. (Or has pulled their iPhone out of their pocket to browse the web for a new desk lamp while sitting at their desktop computer, for that matter.) In fact, 2017 marked the first year mobile devices accounted for the majority of all world-wide web traffic, at 50.3%. This year, that figure has risen to 52.2%.
Of course, e-commerce is following that trend.
Of the $7.9 billion spent in the United States this Cyber Monday, $2.8 billion worth of purchases were made on mobile devices. Smartphones accounted for $2.2 billion of that $2.8 billion, with other mobile devices such as tablets accounting for the rest, if you were wondering. So the point is this: Mobile e-commerce is bigger than ever and growing.
But the barriers to purchase created by clunky mobile retail websites are preventing those numbers from growing as quickly as they could be.
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