Let’s talk about mobile.. and how mobile effects ecommerce. So we all know that mobile internet usage is just exploding. Well, last year mobile e-commerce sales accounted for 29.8 percent of all online e-commerce sales. So basically, 30% of the sales that are made online are already attributed to mobile sales (including tablet).
That number is only expected to get bigger. In fact, it’s expected to double very very soon. So what does that mean for your business? It means that now, like most of you guys have been for a long time, you know mobile is a big deal, you try to buy mobile traffic, but that’s about it — and you basically are half-assing it or ignoring the mobile traffic. So what do you do?
Everybody’s saying “Oh we’re cool –our site is mobile responsive, or our site is mobile ready, or mobile friendly.” We really started paying attention to mobile in one of our ecom store business — forty percent of our traffic comes from mobile. A lot more of our interactive (like content traffic) is mobile as well, but forty percent of our ecommerce store traffic is mobile. That’s a number we can’t ignore. So we started looking at the mobile responsiveness of our site (which it is– it was fully mobile responsive).
However mobile responsive and mobile optimized our two totally different things! Just because something scales down into a small browser window to fit on a mobile phone, doesn’t make it mobile optimized or even mobile friendly. What do I mean? Specifically, your pages may scale down — but they still look like crap. Parts of your code only work only work on full-size browsers so it breaks the page and things like that. So most of your page may scale, but parts of it may have issues.
The bigger issue is in the checkout process. Mobile check out cart abandonment is much higher than desktop or computer. So many mobile checkouts are so clunky and complicated and hard to use. So a mobile responsive check out just takes your existing check out and scales it down. What we’ve done is… we’ve gone back in and we actually paid a company to create a mobile exclusive check out (so a check out that’s designed 100% for mobile and tablets, and optimized and designed specifically for that.) It’s still still early on in doing that, but we have seen a dramatic jump in the amount of completed transactions, simply by having that mobile checkout that’s designed for it.
So we basically have TWO check outs on our site… we have one regular checkout when they go on a computer or whatever they go through the regular check out. On our mobile checkout which is a single page on our mobile checkout our single page checkout would scale but there were so many fields that stuff would get lost and whatever so what we did was we switch to a very simplified multi-step check out for mobile. Which everyone said “Oh my god, multi-step doesn’t work.”
ACTUALLY, on mobile it does! Because there’s less information on each screen, it’s easier to get through, and it just flows much better. So our conversions on mobile have gone up, simply by giving it a dedicated check out. The way it works is that when our website recognizes that they’re on a mobile device or a tablet it automatically swaps that mobile check out in place instead of the original check out. And it’s something that can be added to any site. It makes a big difference. I’ll have another video soon where I will have hard stats, but it’s a it’s a little early for me to give you anything with any kind of finality. So I want to make sure we have some better data first. So take sometime and look at your mobile and make sure you’re actually mobile optimized and not just mobile responsive.