Mobile Ecommerce: Why It Matters
With everything that goes into running an ecommerce website, optimizing your site for mobile may feel like an afterthought. But it shouldn’t. Mobile ecommerce (sometimes called m-commerce) is the future of online shopping. Here are some fast facts about why it’s so important.
Your customers are already on mobile. 77 percent of American consumers own a smart phone and 51 percent report making a purchase from their phone in the past year. 55 percent of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
Mobile sales are growing rapidly. Mobile sales increased 30 percent year-over-year from 2015 to 2016 and, in 2017, covered a third of the market. Forty percent of purchases from last year’s Black Friday sales came from smartphones, an increase of 10 percent from the previous year.
Google is moving towards mobile-first rankings. Google’s bots have begun analyzing site’s mobile experiences first as they determine rankings. Having a good mobile experience will therefore lead to better organic rankings.
Your competitors take it seriously. Major ecommerce sites like Amazon dedicate huge amounts of resources to improving the mobile experience. In 2017, 80 percent of the top Alexa sites were mobile-friendly.
Is My Site Optimized for Mobile?
An ecommerce site that’s optimized for mobile conversions is one that is easy to use on any device, looks great on any screen, and performs well across the board. Here are the most important aspects of design and development for mobile sales.
Responsive design. While it used to be common to build a separate “mobile-friendly” site and redirect mobile traffic there, the current best practice is to use a single website and design it responsively. Responsive design is a way of writing code so that the content on a website expands and contracts fluidly based on the device it’s viewed on. When done well, it gives a seamless and user-friendly experience.
Speed. Speed is always important for ecommerce conversions, but it’s even more important on mobile. If your site is slow to load on desktop, it will be unusable on a mobile device, which has less processing power and is therefore slower. Since loading time is a major factor in ecommerce abandonment, a slow mobile site can really kill conversions.
Read more about the importance of page load speed here.
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Have you ever Googled something from your phone and seen a row of boxes above the search results? Those are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and are part of Google’s initiative to make the web mobile-friendly. They are extremely stripped-down versions of a website that are are super-fast, optimized for mobile conversions, and automatically appear higher on the search results page. Getting them on your ecommerce site is a great way to stay head of the competition.
Read more about Google AMP for BigCommerce.
Not sure if your site is mobile-friendly? Try running it through the Google Search Console’s Mobile-Friendly Test!
Optimize My BigCommerce Site For Mobile
Upgrade To Stencil To Improve Mobile Performance
Speed and performance are two of the most important things for overall mobile usability. Stencil, the newest and most advanced BigCommerce framework, already comes with minified code and fast loading times, which significantly improves the mobile experience. Stencil is also AMP-ready, which means you can start listing your products in that way, too.
