Mobile commerce is exploding, with smartphones accounting for over 78% of all e-commerce traffic. This massive mobile shift presents opportunities and challenges for online retailers in equal measure, but one of the biggest challenges is that many e-commerce sites are still not optimized for mobile users.
Slow load times, cluttered layouts, and complicated checkout processes on mobile are some of the factors that increase bounce rates on e-commerce websites. This may seem trivial, but the stakes are high, as studies show that 88% of online shoppers won’t return after one bad user experience.
The good news is that improving mobile user experience for e-commerce is simple. There are solutions for virtually any UX problem you can imagine, and even small changes can pay big dividends.
In this article, we’ll explore practical tips to optimize your e-commerce site for mobile shoppers and convert them into loyal, repeat customers. By focusing on UX, you can tap into mobile commerce growth and future-proof your success.
Let’s get started!
What Is UX And Why Is It Important?
UX, or User Experience, refers to the overall experience a person has when interacting with a product, service, or system. It encompasses all aspects of the user’s interaction, including the design, usability, accessibility, and overall satisfaction with the product or service.
According to Forrester Research, basic UX changes can boost conversion rates by 400% or more, so it’s easy to see that mobile user experience is crucial for e-commerce stores.
What can great UX do for your e-commerce business?
- Optimized UX can significantly improve conversion rates, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a service, or completing any desired action.
- A positive user experience leads to higher satisfaction rates, which can translate into increased customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and, ultimately, business growth.
- Good UX considers users with diverse abilities and needs, ensuring that products and services are accessible to the widest possible audience.
- A seamless, enjoyable user experience can positively impact a brand’s perception, positioning it as user-centric, innovative, and trustworthy.
How To Improve Your Mobile UX
With a little effort, you can better engage mobile visitors and convert more of them into loyal, repeat customers. Here are eight simple approaches to improve customer experience on your site.
Understand Your Target Audience
Before starting the design process for your mobile site, it’s best to take the time to understand who your mobile customers are at their core.
Resist assumptions and instead use surveys and public forums to uncover actual shopping behaviors, pain points, and motivations. Collect both the positives (to know what aspects are effective) and the negatives (to identify areas for improvement). Then, walk in your customers’ shoes, facing the UX as they do and developing empathy at each touchpoint.
Finally, incorporate these insights into solutions. The better you understand your users, the more likely you are to design and build a site that performs well for them and increases overall user satisfaction, which will boost your SEO performance.
Optimize your site for mobile first
Imagine you find this amazing product that you absolutely need when checking out an online store, but when you attempt to click on the “Add to Cart” button, you realize it’s too small to tap, forcing you to zoom in and out just to navigate. Frustrating, isn’t it?
That’s where responsive design comes to the rescue. Given the increasing traffic from mobile devices, having a website that effortlessly adapts to smaller screens is crucial.
It is advisable to start with a mobile-first approach in the initial planning and building stages of the site because scaling up to the desktop is easier than the other way around.
Regardless of the scenario, responsive design is a top priority. Focus on streamlining key tasks like browsing products, adding items to the cart, and checkout. Make sure text is readable, images are appropriately sized, and buttons have sufficiently large tap targets for fingertips.
Moreover, search engines like Google prioritize the mobile version of websites for indexing. If a site doesn’t adapt well to mobile screens, vital pages may not be crawled properly, reducing traffic and visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs).
While you work on optimizing your mobile site to provide a smooth user experience and boost your e-commerce SEO, it’s important to use a technical SEO tool like Prerender to address web page indexing and technical SEO issues, as this will go a long way in ensuring that all of your pages are index-ready.
Simplified Navigation
The limited screen on mobile devices requires careful space management and a carefully curated presentation of information and options. Most users want smooth interactions when shopping on mobile, and they will jump ship at the first hint of clutter or confusion. To improve user retention, you have to simplify your UX, starting with having only the most important pages in your main menu.
Unlike your desktop version, you have to streamline the shopping experience so that your users don’t get sidetracked exploring your site, and this may mean removing unnecessary desktop features/pages from your front page menu.
For a streamlined mobile UX, secondary or less frequently used options should be reserved for neat “hamburger” menus, preventing information overload and decision fatigue. Hamburger menus enable quick access to navigation, allowing visitors to reach their desired pages quickly while improving usability and speed.
Remember, navigating your mobile e-commerce site should be effortless. Use clear language to communicate expectations/instructions and large, readable fonts without zooming. Consider an image-based navigation menu for a smoother experience.
By providing intuitive navigation that reduces excessive scrolling and clicking, you boost user engagement metrics like bounce rate and time on page, which Google considers for SERPs rankings.
Personalized Product Recommendations
One underrated hack of successful e-commerce platforms is a personalized experience for their users. Without the familiar guidance of an in-store sales representative, customers on e-commerce sites can feel confused and overwhelmed by choice. There’s also an added advantage; a personalized experience makes your users feel important!
To personalize the e-commerce user experience, simply offering generic product recommendations isn’t enough. Instead, personalized product recommendations guide your customers to the products they’re most likely to buy. You can dynamically change the content your customer sees on their homepage based on previous purchases or display “people also buy” suggestions at the checkout.
The placement and format of your product recommendations significantly influence how your customers perceive and engage with them. So remember, you want to present them in a way that is relevant, helpful, and non-intrusive while simultaneously capturing the user’s attention and curiosity.
Prioritize Fast Page Loading Speeds:
Google loves a fast-loading website—and so do your users. Page speed has been a Google ranking factor since 2010, and it became even more important after the 2018 mobile-first indexing update. However, because most e-commerce websites use dynamic content, they are JavaScript-heavy and notoriously slow, which negatively affects UX in different ways.
Slow pages also hurt Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed scores. According to Google, bounce rates increase by 32% when page load takes 1 to 3 seconds and 90% at 5 seconds, and high bounce signals to search engines that your content is irrelevant or useless, lowering click-through rates for your pages and negatively impacting your rankings.
To improve the page speed of your e-commerce platform, you can simply use Prerender. Prerender solves these JavaScript SEO challenges by caching and feeding fully rendered versions of your e-commerce website pages to search engine bots and users alike. This improves your website’s crawling and indexing performance, boosts your page loading speeds, and also increases your SERP ranking.
Prerender ensures server response times (SRT) of less than 50 milliseconds while maintaining an optimal user experience. You can sign up for a demo (it’s free) to stay ahead of the game and unlock peak website performance.
Also, check out these tips to increase page speed to boost your website performance quickly.
Easy And Secure Checkout
A smooth, hassle-free checkout encourages customers to complete their purchases, which is crucial for e-commerce sales. To help your customers have a seamless checkout experience:
- Be upfront about shipping fees and taxes so customers are aware of the situation.
- Streamline the checkout process by only asking for essential info to complete orders faster.
- Have a guest checkout option for those not interested in creating accounts.
- Reassure customers their purchase went through with a “Thank You” page and build trust with verification seals.
- Provide diverse payment options like PayPal, Amazon, and Buy-Now-Pay-Later services to accommodate customer preferences.
Improve Customer Service
When people have a memorable customer service experience, whether good or bad, they naturally want to share it with others. This usually occurs on review websites and social media, with 55% of consumers sharing their purchase experiences on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social sites.
In today’s e-commerce space, if your customer service is great, your customers automatically become ambassadors for your brand through word-of-mouth advertising. On the flip side, bad customer service can ruin your users’ overall experience because it sticks and stands out in their minds.
E-commerce stores can enhance their customer service in several ways:
- Sending automated emails to update shoppers on order status and delivery to keep them informed.
- Offering order tracking to show transparency.
- Integrating new communication tools like live chat. With live chat, you can answer questions in real-time when you’re online, making shoppers feel heard.
Create an Omnichannel Experience
While optimizing the user experience on your e-commerce site is foundational, today’s customers want shopping experiences that go beyond a single website.
Social commerce has exploded in popularity, so it is essential to reach customers where they already spend their time—platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Integrating e-commerce into social media enables seamless browsing and increases purchases and conversions.
By embracing various channels, from social selling to pop-ups, you increase brand awareness and offer enjoyable purchasing experiences across multiple touchpoints.
The idea is to create a uniform commerce experience across platforms, which will drive more sales through more visibility and customer engagement.
Conclusion
First impressions matter on mobile, just as they do on desktop, so optimizing your site’s mobile UX should be a major goal.
By following the tips above, you can start making small but effective changes to your website to make it mobile-friendly and provide customers with the best experience possible. Also, track your customer conversion rates and key performance indicators (KPIs) every time you make UX adjustments to see which strategies produce positive results.
To further improve your modern website’s performance, factor in Javascript dynamic rendering so search engine bots can quickly process and index it. Register now with Prerender for free to get started. Your users will thank you for it, regardless of their device.
