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5 Key Differences Between Mobile and Desktop Shopping

Posted by Lucy TahtMobile/Tablets, Rich Auto Complete, User Experience

It’s critical to optimize your e-commerce site for both mobile and desktop users in order to maintain a strong online presence. The goal is to create a seamless shopping experience for your customers regardless of the device they use to access your site. 

In this article, we’ll highlight the five top differences in desktop and mobile shopping. This should shed some light on how to best create an enjoyable customer shopping experience.  

1. Autocomplete is key for mobile users

Mobile shoppers don’t want to type out long search queries on small, touch screen keyboards. Online shoppers expect a robust autocomplete system that anticipates the products they’re looking for as they type in their search query.   

Implementing an intelligent auto-prediction search function on your site will quickly guide your mobile shoppers to the products they wish to see. Your desktop shoppers will appreciate this function as well, and will come to expect it if they have previously shopped on a mobile device on your site.   

Autocomplete creates a seamless shopping experience across devices, while driving customers to the products they are most likely to purchase. 

2. Mobile shoppers want advanced filtering options

Mobile shoppers want the ability to quickly jump not only to specific products, but also to brand or item-type product levels. Ensure that your site’s search functionality can incorporate smart filtering into results. This allows your mobile shoppers to efficiently navigate your site, whether they want to view a specific product or scroll through many similar products.   

For mobile shoppers operating on small screens, not having to go to multiple menus to navigate to product type or brand pages creates a more pleasant overall shopping experience that they are more likely to repeat. 

3. Mobile screen sizes are significantly smaller, and vary between devices and brands

One of the biggest differences between mobile and desktop shoppers is the difference in hardware and capabilities. Ensure your site functions similarly across devices, regardless of screen size.   

This means paying attention to whether site functionality is maintained across different brands and models of mobile devices, which can include tablets with 13-inch screens, and phones with 4-inch screens. Customers should have an optimized shopping experience on every device. 

4. Mobile wireless connections are slower than desktop broadband

Part of maintaining a seamless shopping experience is accounting for differences in loading times between mobile and desktop devices. In general, desktop devices have more robust hardware and broadband connections capable of loading image or flash-heavy sites much more quickly than their mobile counterparts.   

Mobile devices access your site from a variety of connections, including 3G, 4G LTE, and wireless broadband. Verify that your site design allows mobile devices to load your website’s pages with as little delay as possible. There is nothing more frustrating for mobile shoppers than clicking on the item they want and being greeted by a lengthy loading screen.   

Mobile customers won’t wait for slow sites. This affects customer retention and conversion rates. If your site isn’t optimally configured for a variety of connection speeds and hardware configurations, you risk losing customers and sales. 

5. Payment options

Mobile shoppers are less likely than ever to pull out their credit or debit card and type in all of their information. Incorporate a variety of different payment options on your site. Verify that your site has the ability to accept client-based payment storage options, like ApplePay and Google Pay, as well as more established alternative payment methods like PayPal.  

It’s important to determine if your checkout process is streamlined for mobile shoppers. One-click checkout has become more commonplace and allows both mobile and desktop customers to quickly complete the checkout process using existing payment, billing, and shipping information.  

For more strategies to improve your mobile e-commerce experience, download the white paper: Site Search and the Mobile Experience.  

Analyzing Trends: 3 Ways to Prepare for Black Friday

Posted by Doug McLeanMobile/Tablets, Uncategorized

To be ready for Black Friday Cyber Monday this year, you need to optimize for your mobile shoppers.For retailers, holiday season preparations are in full swing, making now the time to look back at what happened last year and what it taught us. The top three key trends reported in the wake of Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2017 include:

  • Mobile devices accounted for 50% or more of transactions for the first time. These numbers varied depending on the source, but highlighted a statistical trend toward mobile.
  • The value of transactions during the BFCM period last year amounted to $13b – almost a 15% increase year-over-year. This is a hot market for retailers nimble enough to identify and meet consumer needs quickly.
  • For online retailers, there’s no longer two separate dates. BFCM is a four-day festival of shopping.

So, what are the implications of this as we all make inventory and promotion plans for 2018?

The first and perhaps the most actionable trend is the move to mobile devices by online shoppers. Retailers must have a mobile strategy that moves beyond just a responsive site. Retailers must optimize experiences for mobile shoppers using a mobile-first website or custom app. This may mean we’ll see more retailers move to Progressive Web Apps prior to BFCM. Yes, optimizing for mobile may make the PC-browser shopping experiences something of an afterthought. But, shoppers won’t be coming back to PCs, and there are now tools that minimize the development differences between the mobile and PC platforms.

To further endorse investing in mobile, remember that Google started moving to mobile-first indexing in March. So, from a pure SEO perspective, optimizing your sites for mobile users is just sensible.

The second issue that needs to be addressed is the gap between the growth in mobile shoppers and actual mobile transactions. Adobe reported that mobile devices made up 47% of online shopping visits but only 27% of purchases during the 2017 holiday shopping period.

The browser/buyer gap highlighted by Adobe indicates we still have a lot to learn about converting mobile shoppers, but there are some lessons from the desktop world that apply, just more so because of the screen-real-estate challenge. Getting your mobile search functionality right for the 2018 BFCM shopping season really matters.

With these trends in mind, how should a thoughtful practitioner prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2018? SLI Systems’ Customer Success Managers spend every day looking at retail sites and have developed the following three recommendations for 2018.

  1. Omnichannel Retailers Should Optimize Local Search Behavior: Google reports 50% of consumers will visit a store within a day of doing a local search. The implications go beyond SEO strategy. You’ll want your search box to lead shoppers to compelling products and help them purchase either online or in store as quickly as possible. That means you want a search functionality that not only considers the shoppers’ search terms, but also their geo-location, season, and any other behavioral data available. Search results should include not only product options but store locations and local inventory availability when possible.
  2. Personalize Product Recommendations Based on User Device: Historical data indicates that iPhone users tend to spend an estimated 30% more than Android users per transaction. This allows merchandisers to set recommendation rules that either present higher priced (and more profitable) products OR present Android users with promotional discount options tuned to their likely purchase behavior.
  3. Split Your Shopper Analytics into Desktop and Mobile: Desktop/mobile aggregate analytics likely lead to merchandising decisions that serve neither audience very well. Much of the current behavioral data indicates that users (even the same users) do different things on their mobile and desktop devices. So, a mobile savvy merchandiser will evaluate the two audiences separately and look at how search terms, bounce rate, cart abandons and other key metrics affect conversion and average order value. If your current analytics tools aren’t capable of providing this degree of granularity, it’s time to look for new tools.

One final point on the trends we saw last year. Because the BFCM shopping season is no longer two discrete shopping days but a four-day window in which promotions will either succeed or fail, world-class merchandisers are placing more emphasis on monitoring shopper behavior as it happens and adapting pricing and promotions as necessary.

Without extremely robust reporting and merchandising tools, you may find yourself in a position of not “seeing” what’s happening on your store until it’s too late to respond in any meaningful way.

For more on how to be ready for BFCM, check out our e-book E-commerce Merchandising: The Ultimate Guide to the Newest Techniques.

6 Ways to Optimize the Mobile Shopping Experience

Posted by Jason MillereCommerce, Mobile, Mobile/Tablets, Site Search Tips

The stats are in and the message is clear: people are shopping on their smartphones and tablets more and more every day. Mobile commerce in the U.S. is:

Mobile shopping is outpacing desktop shopping; billions of dollars are on the line; and yet smartphone conversion rates remain at an embarrassingly low 1% or less for many retailers. Why? 80% of shoppers say they typically abandon a mobile site if they have a bad user experience (Limelight). To take advantage of this massive opportunity, online retailers need to provide shoppers with an excellent customer experience.

While there are many different ways to address all these different device formats, such as dedicated mobile or tablet sites or even a complete overhaul like Responsive design, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Whichever approach you choose, here are six tips to help you optimize your mobile customer experience:

1. Speed Matters

Nearly half of consumers expect a web page to load in less than two seconds (KISSmetrics). Remember that there is a distinct difference between what a computer calculates as page weight/load time and what a user will consider the page speed. Optimizing web pages for “visually complete” – or the user’s perception of when a page is complete – and optimizing actual page load times will create a better user experience. Tip: Use Google Page Speed Insights for overall comparison and WebPageTest to compare visually.

Image size also matters. Make sure to serve appropriately sized images and remember that even images hidden via CSS for a mobile view will still be downloaded.

  • If using a mobile site, make sure images are sized for that form factor; don’t simply reuse desktop images as they will force users to download excessively large images.
  • If the site is Responsive, make use of client side conditional loading (imager.js) or dynamic image compression (e.g. Akamai’s ION product line) to ensure users aren’t downloading unneeded bytes. Tim Kadlec found that by using a responsive image technique, sites could save up to 72.2% of image weight.

2. Reduce Customer Friction

Conversion rates on average are four to five times higher for people who use on-site search. Additionally, the type of visitors who utilize the search box are showing explicit intent and are more likely to purchase (PFSweb). Mobile users specifically are more likely to use search so make sure your search box is in an obvious place near the top of the page. Tools to ease the on-site searcher’s path-to-purchase include:

  • Rich Auto Complete ­­­­– Ease the pain of typing in search terms on small mobile devices by adding Rich Auto Complete to your search box. Through predictive analysis, this will offer suggested keywords and products as the user is typing the search term. This saves the user time and frustration and is a great way to reduce a customer friction point.
  • Spelling Suggestions – One of the difficulties that come with shopping from a mobile device is that the keyboard may be small or difficult to use, and customers may not be able to type in search words correctly. Account for misspellings or similar words by employing autocorrect or synonym rules. These rules create linkages between words to show the correct products when a word is misspelled or a different term or slang is used. 
  • Reviews & Social Media – Show ratings and reviews with your product results. Provide this social currency on site so users don’t need to leave your site to research products. Also, more shoppers are using social media to get ideas for gifts or find new items they’d like to purchase. Make sure you are catering to your mobile visitors by allowing them to share their favorite products easily among their social networks.

3.  Touch-Enabled Devices

When designing for touch-enabled devices, it’s important to remember the size of the human finger and thumb. The touch target for an index finger is 57 pixels and a thumb is 72 pixels. Making touch targets smaller than these targets can lead to user frustration and incorrect clicks. Moreover, don’t require users to pinch and zoom in order to navigate pages as these actions also lead to a negative user experience.

A very common mistake in mobile development is attempting to port desktop features directly to a mobile device. With a touch-enabled device, the user is not navigating the page with a mouse cursor so keep in mind that functions like hover don’t translate into a positive customer experience. At best, the user will attempt to click the item multiple times to activate the link; at worst, the user will be unable to click through at all. According to Thomas Fuchs, “The easiest way to deal with this is simple: don’t use hover on touch-enabled devices.”

4. Make Checkout Easy

Smart e-commerce companies create as few steps as possible at mobile checkout. When you allow visitors to checkout quickly and easily, they’re more likely to complete the purchase. To speed customers through checkout:

  • Reduce form length (fewer than 6 fields); if multiple steps, show progress
  • Top Align form labels for easy readability while typing
  • Allow guest checkout (to again, “reduce friction”)
  • PayPal/Google Wallet payment options get customers through the process quickly

5. It’s Time to Revolt Against Sliders (on Desktop and Mobile)

There have been numerous studies showing that sliders are useless. Site visitors are highly unlikely to take the time to read each slide or interact with the slider. Notre Dame performed a test with a slider on their homepage, only to find that the first image was the only image to receive interest from visitors (and only 1% of visitors). Take a serious look at your analytics and evaluate whether or not the extra download time and screen real estate is actually providing your customer value or simply satisfying everyone on the committee. Instead of sliders:

  • Show relevant sales items, or personalized offers based on season or geography
  • Show returning customers something based on their shopping affinity or past purchases
  • Avoid banner blindness and focus on what you really want the customer to do

6. Without Testing, You’re Just Guessing

Mobile customer expectations are evolving at a rapid rate so adapting to these ever-changing requirements is critical for success in an extremely competitive e-commerce environment. Performing tests, whether A/B or multivariate, can identify whether a feature can help or hurt your bottom line and is the best means of identifying which tips will best improve your conversion rates.  Looking at what your competitors do and industry best practices are only starting points; you also need to know what your audience responds well to.

To learn more about how to improve conversion rates and increase revenue from your mobile sites and apps, visit https://blog.sli-systems.com/solutions/mobile-site-search.

Mobile Shoppers Rarely Give Second Chances

Posted by Dawn MortenseneCommerce, Mobile/Tablets, Site Search Tips2 comments

Many eCommerce sites are flirting with mobile buyers; some eTailers have fully committed. But a recent Harris Interactive survey makes this clear: if you fail to perform during a shopper’s first visit on your site, don’t count on getting a second chance.

More than 70 percent of U.S. consumers use their smartphones to shop, and among those shoppers, 88 percent have had a negative experience. Most of us can relate to the frustration of having tried to make a purchase via smartphone only to abandon our cart mid-way through the experience. However, according to this study, an alarming 30 percent said that they would never return to that particular retailer’s mobile website again.

How can eCommerce businesses prepare for the shift to mobile?

Whether or not you have a mobile site now, it’s time to treat it seriously. Perhaps you quickly created a basic site a couple years ago to respond to the trend of mobile shopping, or you’re just thinking about moving to the mobile space. Whichever stage you are at, there are some common Mistakes to Avoid when optimizing your mobile site.

Forrester Research, in its 2013 paper Mobile Trends for Marketers, announced that “mobile on the cheap is over,” and suggested that businesses treat it as a strategic priority rather than an afterthought.

The top complaints of mobile shoppers are:

  1. Retailers’ websites are harder to navigate and use on a mobile device than on a desktop (51%)
  2. Product images are too small to make a buying decision (46%)
  3. Concerns over security on a smartphone (41%)
  4. Checkout process is a pain (26%)

 

If these problems sound familiar for your own mobile site, take these proactive steps to improve the experience for your customers. You can start identifying what your mobile site needs by reviewing best practices, as outlined in the Whitepaper “Site Search and the Mobile Experience.” Then set up a site critique for specific, personalized recommendations on how to increase your conversions and boost your average order value, both on your web site and mobile sites.

Mobile shoppers are not the most patient or forgiving crowd. Considering that there are now more than a billion consumers with smartphones and more than 150 million tablets sold, it’s crucial to recognize that consumers around the world are driving a shift in how purchasing is done. By launching a new mobile site or optimizing your existing one, you’ll attract, engage and keep customers coming back.

Cyber Monday Revenues of $1.465 Billion Top Black Friday Sales

Posted by Terry CostaeCommerce, Mobile/Tablets

While we were impressed with Black Friday’s online sales, we were blown away by the revenues generated the following Monday. The biggest Cyber Monday on record saw exceptionally strong sales, with revenues topping $1.465 Billion – up 17 percent from last year and exceeding Black Friday sales. The weekend between the two big shopping days was also hot – bringing in over $1.1 Billion from weekend shoppers.

As with Black Friday, Cyber Monday also saw a huge focus on mobile – as shoppers pulled out their phones and tablets to aid their shopping. Cyber Monday saw an increase in purchases from iPhones over other smartphones or the iPad. These statistics from TabletCrunch show updated mobile numbers based on Cyber Monday sales.

  • Mobile Traffic: 22.4 percent of consumers use a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site
  • Mobile Shopping: 12 percent of consumers use their mobile device to make a purchase
  • The Multi-Screen shopper: The iPhone is driving more retail shopping than any other device with traffic reaching 8.7 percent versus 7.2 percent and 6.3 percent for iPad and Android respectively

Much of the increase around the holidays this year was based around early discounts and deals specifically targeted to online shoppers. Shoppers are increasingly turning to online shopping for around-the-clock shopping convenience, lack of crowds, easy price comparisons and free shipping offers.

As online retail continues to grow, the space is becoming more competitive and finding ways to set your eCommerce site apart from others is essential. Luckily the steps to doing so are not as hard as you’d think – there are simple ways to improve your site that yield great returns. We’ve highlighted a lot of these in previous blogs.

We experienced the impact of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush from our clients firsthand, as we saw huge spikes in traffic on our clients’ websites – they more than doubled on Black Friday and increased by 50 percent on Cyber Monday. Interestingly, some of our data shows that Black Friday traffic was helped by shoppers in Brazil, who also jumped online to take advantage of holiday sales.

These major shopping events remind us how our work can mean the difference between a sale and a loss. We provide our clients with peace of mind that our service won’t go down during peak holiday traffic – our servers are “over-optimized” to handle massive spikes in search traffic, as well as natural disasters and other unforeseen issues.

As shoppers become more savvy and continue to reach for their laptop or mobile device from around the globe when they want to make a purchase, make sure you’re in the best possible position to lead customers to the products they want.