According to a survey by PriceGrabber, 23% of U.S. consumers say they feel comfortable making a purchase from their smart phone. That’s up 16% over 2012 and the trends show no signs of mobile usage slowing down. Interestingly, many on-line retailers seem to have blinders on about the importance of the mobile shopping experience.
We all rely on analytics to make data driven decisions to gain insights into what’s working and what’s not so we can set priorities and spend valuable resources in the best way possible. When it comes to mobile, the numbers may not tell the whole story. If you’re not getting much mobile traffic, it would be easy to believe that means mobile isn’t important to your target audience.
However, if you’re an online retailer and aren’t getting much mobile traffic, it may mean that the mobile shopping experience isn’t optimized for smaller devices and shoppers on the go. According to ComScore, 55% of all time spent with online retail happens on a mobile device which would indicate that all online retailers should be seeing a significant amount of traffic driven from smart phones and tablets.
A miniaturized version of the website works reasonably well on a tablet because the screen is bigger than a smart phone, this has led to a common misconception. There’s an assumption that tablets are used more than smart phones and so there is no need to optimize the mobile shopping experience for the smaller device.
However according to the June 2013 ComScore mobile statisticsreport, smartphones accounted for 44% of the mobile activity and 11% was tablet based. Consumers are using their smart phones for a lot more than locating store locations or coupons, 64% of smartphone owners use their device for product research.
So what does this mean? It means that if your mobile experience isn’t “merry” or in other words optimized for shoppers on the go you’re not getting your share of mobile shoppers and sales.
An optimized mobile shopping interface includes these features:
- A display that includes only the most important product features
- Seamless integration with your online catalog
- Easy to use filters and refinement options
- AutoComplete
- Thumbnail images
- Mobile-friendly product descriptions
It may be too late to make changes for the 2013 holiday shopping season, but it’s not too early to start planning to optimize the mobile shoppingexperience for your website.
Share your tips for optimizing the mobile experience in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.
