With a rushing growth of mobile phones and smartphones use currently, businesses are left nothing but to adapt to the way how people prefer to buy. If a business wants to improve its performance and increase its sales, the only way is to go mobile, i.e. build their Web stores with the universal (both for Web browsers and for mobile devices) UI or create purely mobile applications for their online shops.
Let’s have some review of how mobile online stores performed in the market in 2017. According to multiple studies (performed by digitalcommerce360 and statista), almost 35% of the US e-commerce sales were made with use of mobile devices in 2017. It means that every third purchase was performed on a mobile phone. And the forecasts say that sales via smartphones and tablets will reach approximately USD 210 billion, compared to slightly over 150 billion, that is, will grow by 30+%.
The look is like the epoch of desktops and laptops is setting down, as now almost everyone has a smartphone or a tablet. Our vision is that mobile sales will continue growing in numbers and in cash, and will double within the nearest 3-4 years or even faster.
Hence, how businesses can get accustomed to such market situation?
There are several tips that will certainly do not harm to the sales and overall business performance.
- Build adaptable e-commerce sites and online stores, running equally smoothly both on desktop PCs/laptops and smartphones/tablets.
- Focus on imagery not text, as people save about 80% of images they see compared to just less than 20% of the text description the read.
- Keep the design of e-commerce sites and mobile store simple and free of excessive information and details, to make their look clean, nicely organized, and easy to use and navigate through.
- Introduce on adding a reliable and accurate search tool, as nobody wants to spend hours browsing through the whole list of goods and products available on the site to choose the right one.
- Make all contact details, such as phone number, email address, Skype etc, clickable and executable in a respective external app, as it will make your potential customers save time on copy-paste thing and on launching any relevant external app.
- Make sure to enable push notifications for your mobile stores, as it will help you keep your customers engaged and informed of any promotion or sale event you are going to hold.
- Mobile payments support is a MUST and should be fast, reliable and secure, to allow your customers buy your products on the go, in crowded locations and at their homes.
- Get rid of irrelevant ads on your mobile stores and mobile websites, as those waste too much of the screen space and force potential customers off the store or site.
- Make sure to employ usability testing of a proper degree before launching your e-commerce website or mobile store, as it will reveal all bugs and pitfalls which otherwise may pop up during the commercial operation of your stores and sites.
- Last but not least in this post shall be our recommendation to assign development of your e-commerce website or mobile store to those developers who really care about their reputation and have successful past history of building such solutions. Don’t be swayed by low prices and short performance schedules – you should know already that a good quality product (or service) cannot cost a dollar. Our recommendation is to perform a scrupulous research to short-list suitable software development companies, then test each of them to pick up the best one.
Our understanding is that businesses that are too lazy or too slow with getting adapted to the fast-changing market will be left aside and won’t be able to keep up with their competitors. So, don’t miss the proper time and chance to be among the market leaders.
