“If you’re reading this, you’re too close,” an understated bumper sticker once read. Black November is here, and the most significant online shopping days of the year are ahead. Last year mobile purchases (including tablets) accounted for near half of the $6.2 billion spent online during Black Friday, alone. Digital revenue is predicted to grow this season by 13% over 2018, and mobile may finally edge out desktop as the preferred method of shopping online. With Black November upon us, overhauling your mobile shopping experience must wait, but below are simple mobile e-commerce optimizations that you can still perform before Black Friday.
Remove friction from your checkout process
Many factors determine a customer’s patience and desire to tolerate slow loading mobile websites. Still, a rule of thumb tells us that reducing load times even by a single second can significantly increase sales. Although 5G wireless is expected to take your e-commerce business to new heights, infrastructure, and coverage issues mean consumers won’t see widespread access until 2023. Until then, most shoppers are roaming in 2G or 3G and will click away if they have to wait for more than 2 seconds for a page to load. Given this, look for ways to optimize the load speed of your mobile website by making a few changes. First, ensure that your product images are appropriately sized for quick loading. A useful compression tool can reduce weight in an instant without sacrificing image quality. Next, consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache your content, including single-page applications, CSS, and HTML pages. A CDN redistributes your web content across a network of locally-based and load-balanced servers, meaning the whole process happens quicker.
The Need for Speed
Many factors determine a customer’s patience and desire to tolerate slow loading mobile websites. Still, a rule of thumb tells us that reducing load times even by a single second can significantly increase sales. Although 5G wireless is expected to take your e-commerce business to new heights, infrastructure, and coverage issues mean consumers won’t see widespread access until 2023. Until then, most shoppers are roaming in 2G or 3G and will click away if they have to wait for more than 2 seconds for a page to load. Given this, look for ways to optimize the load speed of your mobile website by making a few changes. First, ensure that your product images are appropriately sized for quick loading. A useful compression tool can reduce weight in an instant without sacrificing image quality. Next, consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache your content, including single-page applications, CSS, and HTML pages. A CDN redistributes your web content across a network of locally-based and load-balanced servers, meaning the whole process happens quicker.
Many factors determine a customer’s patience and desire to tolerate slow loading mobile websites. Still, a rule of thumb tells us that reducing load times even by a single second can significantly increase sales. Although 5G wireless is expected to take your e-commerce business to new heights, infrastructure, and coverage issues mean consumers won’t see widespread access until 2023. Until then, most shoppers are roaming in 2G or 3G and will click away if they have to wait for more than 2 seconds for a page to load. Given this, look for ways to optimize the load speed of your mobile website by making a few changes. First, ensure that your product images are appropriately sized for quick loading. A useful compression tool can reduce weight in an instant without sacrificing image quality. Next, consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache your content, including single-page applications, CSS, and HTML pages. A CDN redistributes your web content across a network of locally-based and load-balanced servers, meaning the whole process happens quicker.
Test Multiple Browser Configurations
There are more screen sizes and browser configurations than ever before. In fact, you may have noticed in your analytics that your different customer personas have a common browser type. Your mobile store must display correctly on each, if possible. Each web browser produces its own mobile version, which can render a website based on its detailed specifications. There are infinite browser versions in play, and you can’t assume that your customers are using the latest version. While responsive web design scales page content based on a sliding percentage (as opposed to fixed size), don’t assume your job is done by merely having a mobile site. Thoroughly testing your mobile shopping experience all the way through checkout is key to understanding how each browser version displays your page elements.
Comprehensive testing tools are available online, but many say nothing beats the personal experience of navigating your site with a phone other than your own. Pro tip: Challenge your employees to navigate your mobile site with their personal devices, assuming a diverse mix of old and new technology.
Running a Mobile E-Commerce Business is like a Marathon.
While seasonality and peak traffic changes within the calendar year, view each improvement to your business as a milestone that you can plan for, execute, test, and repeat. Good luck this Holiday Season!
Looking forward to 2020, the Zobrist team is ready to help you with all of your eCommerce needs. Contact us at sales@zobristinc.com.
