If you’re heading into the holiday season with a half-hearted mobile arm of your business, then you just might be missing out on the future of client interaction. The entire world is slowly heading toward a mobile experience, so it’ll be up to you to make sure that your company stays competitive while your customers move into the mobile space.
The Future is Mobile … Get Used to It
You may not realize it, but in 2015, mobile commerce grew 5 percent from the previous year. That increase in mobile performance put online sales at about 30 percent of the total sales for the entire year. In hard numbers, mobile accounted for a little over $100 billion in sales.
Those numbers are constantly climbing, too. Just this year, PayPal’s own money experts analyzed Black Friday sales which topped $3 billion dollars. That’s more than a third of total Black Friday shopping sales. Sure, it’s a big shopping day, but the message is clear: people are becoming more inclined to pick up their phone and buy something than to brave the maddening crowds.
It’s Not Enough to Be Online
No matter what business you’re in, the shrewd entrepreneur knows that the shift toward mobile sales is happening in droves. Everyone who sells a product is dead set on making sure that their products are purchasable online. However, it’s not enough to simply put your catalog online, you need to make sure your buying experience is as efficient as possible, especially when it comes to nabbing millennials.
Most young shoppers are eager to buy online, yet they’re generally discouraged by most user interfaces. If you can put your business in a position to capture those shoppers efficiently, you’ll have an edge over a vast majority of your competition.
But How?
Whether you’re attracting users to your mobile site via Facebook advertising or Google search engines, you need to think through the entire buying process. Your Facebook or Google ad (or organic title tag) needs to be specific and click-worthy. Titles on mobile are truncated at 78 characters.
The landing page you choose to send the user to needs to be clean and, you guessed it, mobile friendly. Easy-to-read text, easy-to-click buttons, simple purchase options, and no pop-ups. If your user tries to tap a link, but can’t because your product button is too small, they’re gone.
Once you’ve nailed your product page, make sure the mobile shopping cart experience is enjoyable. The fewer pages that need to be loaded during checkout, the better. Remember, this is mobile and sometimes connections can be slow. If your pages take 3 seconds to load and your checkout process is 4 pages, they could abandon their shopping cart. Take notes from Amazon’s shopping cart experience; it’s one page, one click to purchase (assuming you have an account with them). Genius.
Think Mobile, Think Easy
Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, you can’t really go wrong by putting your products online (no matter what you sell). The customers are there, and they’re just waiting for a mobile interface that lets them spend their money as fast as humanly possible.