Mobile devices connect more than 4.5 billion people to the internet—that’s over half of the global population! People are also spending an inordinate amount of time at home these days, which means a significant amount of shopping is being conducted via cell phones. 

Mobile eCommerce was expected to grow 20% in 2020, and expected to surpass 50% of total US eCommerce sales in less than two years—there is a huge opportunity for online retailers. Take this time now to optimize your mobile experience ahead of the holidays to reduce cart abandonment and enhance your web store’s checkout and overall shopping experience.

Read on for advice on how to create a superior mobile eCommerce experience and seize the moment this holiday season brings.

Provide a Seamless Mobile Checkout Experience

There are so many potential obstacles in your way as an online retailer—don’t blow it right before the finish line! A smooth checkout experience is crucial for conversions. Unfortunately, 85% of cart abandonment on mobile happens at checkout. This checkout conversion problem results in a whopping $1 trillion in abandoned checkouts in the US alone, and more than $10 trillion globally each year.

The biggest reasons for mobile cart abandonment are requiring a shopper to create an account (34%), having a long or complicated checkout process (26%), and not enabling a shopper to calculate their order total up front (21%), according to a study.

This is why it’s so important to offer guest checkout on your web store, particularly during the busy holiday season. Third-party payment solutions can also ease issues and provide a more seamless mobile checkout experience. Enable services such as PayPal, Amazon Pay, Google Pay and Apple Pay to make it easy for shoppers to swiftly make their purchases, without having to pull out their credit card. Offering these eCommerce options also adds an extra level of credibility, and saves your customer from having to enter their shipping information too, as it’s stored with their payment information.

Optimize Everything for Mobile

52% of 18-to 25-year-olds in the US prefer to use a smartphone to buy physical goods online, according to Forrester. This means that eCommerce sites that cater to mobile browsers have a huge advantage, by catching customers where and how they shop.

To drive conversions with these shoppers it’s important to fully optimize your mobile shopping experience. After you’ve ensured your checkout experience is safe and easy to use, look at the rest of your purchase flow. Retarget interested shoppers with a thoughtful strategy aimed at people who have expressed interest in your product in the past. You also need to send abandoned cart notifications to reel back shoppers who dropped off along the way. Often cart abandonment is caused by slow load times, so increase your site performance to ensure you’re maximizing your traffic.

Look out for any gates that may be obstructing your purchase funnels. You want to be guiding customers from interest to intent to purchase. Gates create friction in the shopping experience where customers are forced to input information or take an unwanted action—don’t make people answer surveys or add personal information where it’s not necessary. Offer product-page checkout or instant checkout as an alternate checkout option to increase the speed with which shoppers can purchase.

Use Deep Linking

Deep linking is a powerful way to increase conversions through seamless user experiences across paid advertising, email, SMS campaigns, referral programs and more. By facilitating relevant experiences, you can generate higher conversion rates and retain more customers.

Native deep linking solutions exist for both Android and iOS, but for more robust, universal deep linking tools, it’s recommended to use a holistic attribution provider. AppsFlyer’s OneLink is one example that leverages attribution data to generate a single link that can automatically detect a user’s device, channel, platform and app state (installed or not), so that you can then send them to the optimal web or app page.

Your shoppers are probably using multiple devices to browse and then purchase from your store, so this holistic attribution data can give you valuable insights into their entire user journey. This includes finding out the specific web, app and owned marketing touchpoints that drove them to engage with your store. You can then use these insights to optimize your marketing and segment your audience, in order to target and deliver personalized messaging to them across channels and devices.

Conclusion

These are just three strategies for implementing a highly optimized and successful mobile shopping experience. If you follow these tips, you’ll take convenience to the next level and exceed your customer’s expectations in an age where personalized, seamless experiences are key to a satisfying and successful mobile shopping experience. If you’d like a tailored approach to your business’s mobile holiday strategy, reach out to us today.

We are living in crazy times. No matter where we go, we are being bombarded with an enormous amount of content, leading to sensory overload. As an eCommerce player you need to ask yourself, ‘Is my website a part of the problem?”

No matter what segment of the ecommerce industry your webstore is in, there are an astonishing number of sites completely overloaded with useless tools, elements, and features.

It’s bad enough to have these pointless elements on a merchant’s site, but when you consider the negative impact of overcrowding and distraction, these seemingly harmless features are likely costing visitors and conversions. A frustrating user experience (like an overwhelming website) is often pointed to as the reason a potential customer leaves a website prematurely.

We want to help stop the madness. In an online world where everything is happening all at once, let your website be a respite for your visitors’ weary eyes.

In this guide we’ll how to analyze your eCommerce site and identify which  unneeded elements are most distracting.

Henry David Thoreau (yes, the woods guy) once said, “our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” 

Replace “life” with “website” and you’re looking at the entire theme of this article. Your website visitors are just like you, or any other human being: past a certain threshold, the more information there is to look at, the more difficult to process it all can be.

As brands continually add elements to their website, visitors in favor of quantity of information. 

On any given page, there should be a clear path for a website visitor. On a blog post, the goal of the page may be to encourage them to read another blog post, or perhaps to navigate to what the company has to offer besides their words. If it is a product page, ideally you’d want a visitor to add that product to the cart. There is always a natural next step, and it is up to the website developers and owners  to make that step clear and easy to access. But if your site is too cluttered, it will leave visitors lost and confused. Here are five commonly used elements that can distract customers from easily moving through the buying process:

1. Automatically Sliding Carousel

When one element is moving on an otherwise stationary page, it draws the eye away from something that a visitor might have been looking at or about to click.

The biggest culprit of the automatically sliding carousel is the home page. Oftentimes a company will have three incredible heroes and they just can’t choose between them, so we want them all to cycle through. Our advice? Choose one.

If you can’t choose, then at least prioritize and let your visitors scroll through them at their own leisure (but be sure to be tracking engagement on the arrows).

In all honesty, we haven’t  seen a product page automatic image slider since 2017, but in case you still have one of those, disable that automatic slide too.

2. To Much Content

A design team is a beautiful thing, and working together they can create wonderful images for every page of your site – but don’t let design run wild on your site.  

When a  page features too many photos or graphicsyou may be deluging your visitors with a flood of unneeded images – even if they are beautiful and engaging by all standards. One example of having too many photos is when they  cause products to be pushed down below-the-fold on a category page.

3. Social Media Links

Social media is, for better or for worse, an integral part of many peoples’ daily lives. However, on your website, social media is a distraction. 

Many product pages carry social media sharing links in the hopes that a visitor will provide some free publicity, but it just doesn’t happen very often. We checked the data across 10 different ecommerce websites with social links on the product page, and found that not one of them had even moderately used social links. 

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is this: remove the links from your product page. If someone has a burning desire to share your product on social media, they will still be able to copy and paste the URL. For everyone else, remove the icons and therefore increase their focus on what we all actually want them to do: make a purchase . 

If you must have social media links, our recommendation would be to place them on the confirmation page. After a visitor has purchased your product, asking them to share will no longer affect the buying process, as they have already successfully completed the purchase.

4. Endless Product Thumbnails

While we’re on the product page, let’s talk about product images. You have them, you need them, your visitors love them. What’s the problem? The problem is  that your visitors love them – a little too much. 

Viewing any mobile click-map, it will be apparent that tapping through all of the product images is one of the most utilized customer journeys out there. If you ascribe a conversion rate to those clicks, though, you’ll see it’s almost always among the lowest on the entire page.

Product thumbnails on mobile lead to high quantity and low quality engagement. Why is that?

People love interaction. There’s definitely some neurotransmitter getting released when you click on something knowing full well you’re going to get a new and exciting image. The problem is, the reward isn’t nearly as exciting as our brains want it to be. It’s the same product we were just looking at, but from a slightly different angle.

So what’s the solution? On mobile devices, replace your thumbnails with a Dot Slider.

What we want to do by removing the thumbnails is discourage our aimless monkey/human behavior. There are some visitors who truly do need to see the product from different angles, but most of us are just pressing buttons to see what will happen. 

Keep your extra images, but simply replacing the thumbnails with a simple Dot Slider will do wonders for your conversion rate.

5. Cart and Checkout Header

Distractions aside, you’ve managed to get your visitor to add an item to the cart – congratulations! 

Now the real trouble begins. The average cart abandonment rate hovers somewhere around 80%. That is to say, of all of the visitors who have gone through your website, identified a product they liked, and added it to the cart… 80% of them do not complete that checkout process.

In the cart and checkout process, it is beyond imperative to not provide too many options and elements to click on, but to encourage a smooth, seamless transition to transaction. 

Every company’s cart and checkout process and display is different, but something that nearly everyone has in common is a site header. On the cart and checkout pages, the header is fairly unnecessary – you’re encouraging people to keep browsing your site when in fact you want them to just check out. Talk about mixed signals.

On the cart page, keep your logo, keep account information… but that might be it. As long as there is still a way to navigate out of the cart and checkout page (clicking the logo to take the visitor to the home page, for instance), a less distracting header will help move visitors along the checkout process with more speed and ease.

One of our clients asked us to A/B test this idea before implementing. We ran the test for both desktop and mobile visitors, and even though the types of headers are different, the results were the same.

A simpler header in the cart led to a higher conversion rate and made our client over $5,000 in just three weeks of testing.

If you’re not ready to remove the header from your cart page, at least take a baby step and simplify the checkout header down to the absolute basics. You’ll thank us later!

Still not convinced? Run a test

Simplify, simplify

Small, simple changes can keep your website as it should be – clear, clean and with a sense of direction. 

Our recommendations come from years of testing experience, but if you think you might be the exception to the rule, we encourage you to run a test and see for yourself (you can use the free version of Google Optimize or contact us to help). 

Take a close look at your website and see what else is not aiding you or your goals. We have seen enormous amounts of revenue gain come from unexpectedly simple removals and changes. 

Our takeaway advice is this: keep your website free from distraction and your visitors will continue on with their purpose to purchase. Happy deleting!

1. Automatically Sliding Carousel

When one element is moving on an otherwise stationary page, it draws the eye away from something that a visitor might have been looking at or about to click.

The biggest culprit of the automatically sliding carousel is the home page. Oftentimes a company will have three incredible heroes and they just can’t choose between them, so we want them all to cycle through. Our advice? Choose one.

If you can’t choose, then at least prioritize and let your visitors scroll through them at their own leisure (but be sure to be tracking engagement on the arrows).

In all honesty, we haven’t  seen a product page automatic image slider since 2017, but in case you still have one of those, disable that automatic slide too.

2. To Much Content

A design team is a beautiful thing, and working together they can create wonderful images for every page of your site – but don’t let design run wild on your site.  

When a  page features too many photos or graphicsyou may be deluging your visitors with a flood of unneeded images – even if they are beautiful and engaging by all standards. One example of having too many photos is when they  cause products to be pushed down below-the-fold on a category page.

3. Social Media Links

Social media is, for better or for worse, an integral part of many peoples’ daily lives. However, on your website, social media is a distraction. 

Many product pages carry social media sharing links in the hopes that a visitor will provide some free publicity, but it just doesn’t happen very often. We checked the data across 10 different ecommerce websites with social links on the product page, and found that not one of them had even moderately used social links. 

Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is this: remove the links from your product page. If someone has a burning desire to share your product on social media, they will still be able to copy and paste the URL. For everyone else, remove the icons and therefore increase their focus on what we all actually want them to do: make a purchase . 

If you must have social media links, our recommendation would be to place them on the confirmation page. After a visitor has purchased your product, asking them to share will no longer affect the buying process, as they have already successfully completed the purchase.

4. Endless Product Thumbnails

While we’re on the product page, let’s talk about product images. You have them, you need them, your visitors love them. What’s the problem? The problem is  that your visitors love them – a little too much. 

Viewing any mobile click-map, it will be apparent that tapping through all of the product images is one of the most utilized customer journeys out there. If you ascribe a conversion rate to those clicks, though, you’ll see it’s almost always among the lowest on the entire page.

Product thumbnails on mobile lead to high quantity and low quality engagement. Why is that?

People love interaction. There’s definitely some neurotransmitter getting released when you click on something knowing full well you’re going to get a new and exciting image. The problem is, the reward isn’t nearly as exciting as our brains want it to be. It’s the same product we were just looking at, but from a slightly different angle.

So what’s the solution? On mobile devices, replace your thumbnails with a Dot Slider.

What we want to do by removing the thumbnails is discourage our aimless monkey/human behavior. There are some visitors who truly do need to see the product from different angles, but most of us are just pressing buttons to see what will happen. 

Keep your extra images, but simply replacing the thumbnails with a simple Dot Slider will do wonders for your conversion rate.

5. Cart and Checkout Header

Distractions aside, you’ve managed to get your visitor to add an item to the cart – congratulations! 

Now the real trouble begins. The average cart abandonment rate hovers somewhere around 80%. That is to say, of all of the visitors who have gone through your website, identified a product they liked, and added it to the cart… 80% of them do not complete that checkout process.

In the cart and checkout process, it is beyond imperative to not provide too many options and elements to click on, but to encourage a smooth, seamless transition to transaction. 

Every company’s cart and checkout process and display is different, but something that nearly everyone has in common is a site header. On the cart and checkout pages, the header is fairly unnecessary – you’re encouraging people to keep browsing your site when in fact you want them to just check out. Talk about mixed signals!

On the cart page, keep your logo, keep account information… but that might be it. As long as there is still a way to navigate out of the cart and checkout page (clicking the logo to take the visitor to the home page, for instance), a less distracting header will help move visitors along the checkout process with more speed and ease.

One of our clients asked us to A/B test this idea before implementing. We ran the test for both desktop and mobile visitors, and even though the types of headers are different, the results were the same.

A simpler header in the cart led to a higher conversion rate and made our client over $5,000 in just three weeks of testing.

If you’re not ready to remove the header from your cart page, at least take a baby step and simplify the checkout header down to the absolute basics. You’ll thank us later!

Still not convinced? Run a test

Simplify, simplify

Small, simple changes can keep your website as it should be – clear, clean and with a sense of direction. 

Our recommendations come from years of testing experience, but if you think you might be the exception to the rule, we encourage you to run a test and see for yourself (you can use the free version of Google Optimize or contact us to help). 

Take a close look at your website and see what else is not aiding you or your goals. We have seen enormous amounts of revenue gain come from unexpectedly simple removals and changes. 

Our takeaway advice is this: keep your website free from distraction and your visitors will continue on with their purpose to purchase. Happy deleting!

Henry David Thoreau (yes, the woods guy) once said, “our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” 

Replace “life” with “website” and you’re looking at the entire theme of this article. Your website visitors are just like you, or any other human being: past a certain threshold, the more information there is to look at, the more difficult to process it all can be.

As brands continually add elements to their website, visitors in favor of quantity of information. 

Henry David Thoreau (yes, the woods guy) once said, “our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” 

Replace “life” with “website” and you’re looking at the entire theme of this article. Your website visitors are just like you, or any other human being: past a certain threshold, the more information there is to look at, the more difficult to process it all can be.

As brands continually add elements to their website, visitors in favor of quantity of information. 

Henry David Thoreau (yes, the woods guy) once said, “our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” 

Replace “life” with “website” and you’re looking at the entire theme of this article. Your website visitors are just like you, or any other human being: past a certain threshold, the more information there is to look at, the more difficult to process it all can be.

As brands continually add elements to their website, visitors in favor of quantity of information. 

Henry David Thoreau (yes, the woods guy) once said, “our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” 

Replace “life” with “website” and you’re looking at the entire theme of this article. Your website visitors are just like you, or any other human being: past a certain threshold, the more information there is to look at, the more difficult to process it all can be.

As brands continually add elements to their website, visitors in favor of quantity of information. 

After a year unlike any other, we can all be sure of one thing: this is also going to be a drastically different holiday season. People’s lives have changed and, as a result, their priorities and shopping habits have also shifted. 

Despite all of the uncertainty, holiday shopping is charging ahead. The overall eCommerce conversion rate is up 6% from last year, and a study found that 20% of respondents had already started their holiday shopping in August. This will no doubt only increase as the holiday season goes on. 

But different times call for different approaches for brands and retailers, and with the increase in online shopping, eCommerce platforms need to be prepared. With that in mind, here are three strategies for a successful 2020 holiday season. 

Appeal to the Ethical Shopper

This year we’ve noticed a huge change in what consumers value, with a dramatic increase in buyers prioritizing health, sustainability and purpose-driven brands. According to Nielsen, over 80% of people feel that companies should help improve the environment, 68% of online shoppers deem product sustainability an important factor in making a purchase, and 77% of millennials prefer to buy from environmentally-conscious brands. Sustainability is at the top of consumers’ wish lists, so if you can prove that your brand is acting in an ethical and sustainable manner, you’ll come out on top these holidays.

Positioning your brand as sustainable and ethical could manifest itself in how you market your products, by promoting a “buy well, use well” mentality; less is more. It could also mean adapting your supply chain and incorporating recyclable materials and sustainable processes. You may want to use Product Information Management to enable shoppers to filter your products based on attributes they’re passionate about, such as whether it was made using sustainable materials.

Whatever you do, make sure you communicate your sustainability initiatives clearly on your website, social media and email and text marketing! Like this example from Christy Dawn:

Give the Gift of Philanthropy

Similarly to sustainability, a brand or retailer’s philanthropy is another hugely important consideration for shoppers in 2020. Research by Accenture Strategy finds that people are making careful choices to purchase from brands that stand for a purpose that reflects their values and beliefs. According to KPMG’s Global Retail Trends 2020, brands that demonstrate a positive impact on people’s lives grow 2.5 times more than brands with a low perceived impact. This means brands need to practice what they preach; rather than sharing a mission statement with vague goals, they need to take tangible actions to create a more equitable world.

Be one of the many brands that show they care through generous deeds, be it donating a portion of profits to food banks, providing a special discount for first responders, or giving away products to people in need. Some brands like Toms have been doing that for years, with their “buy one, give one” strategy.

Involve your customers in your efforts for even greater engagement via online surveys, social media or live chat. Use all available channels to share your fundraising efforts, but keep your customer preferences in mind to ensure you’re creating targeted, effective engagements. Whichever method you choose, demonstrate your purpose-driven values and you will be sure to win more loyal customers. Check out this example from Everlane.

Practice Mindful Marketing

Profit isn’t everything; we all know that. Show that you stand for more than just money and speak to the powerful moment we’re all in. This has been a year where multiple concerns have become top of mind. We’re also all dealing with sensory overload. According to Hootsuite, almost four billion people use social media today, which is roughly 51% of the entire global population.

All of us are online more than ever, and we’re all getting hit with more and more marketing messages in a variety of formats. You can’t—and don’t want to—just cease communication. But you can be more strategic about what you’re sending (and how, and when, and why).

Start building meaningful connections with consumers through mindfully crafted social media and email marketing. You can do this by emphasizing real-time conversation over promotion—seizing opportunities to engage in moments and on topics of importance to people, instead of simply trying to sell products.

Approach your communications with empathy and imbue your brand with the humanity that you have as a person. This year has been traumatic for many—prove you’re trustworthy. Don’t shy away from important topics. Take a stance, provide tangible value, and maintain your consistent, yet evolving, brand voice.

Conclusion

The future may still be uncertain, but we hope this blog provides some guidance to help you prepare your brand for what we all hope will be a very busy holiday season. If you’d like any personalized assistance getting your web store ready for the holidays, please get in touch with us today.