Why Mobile UX Matters

It may come as no surprise that 59% of eCommerce purchases are made on a mobile device. Nearly 80% of smartphone users have made a purchase from their phone in the past 6 months, so having a mobile-friendly site is critical to streamlining the buyer’s journey and maximizing sales. 

The design for your mobile eCommerce site should consider all processes, from the landing page to the checkout path users take to making a purchase. Making your site user-friendly will not only appease search engines but also keep customers on your site so they’re more likely to follow through with a purchase. Each of the pages on your mobile site invite different considerations, but in this article we’re going to focus specifically on the design and functionality of your mobile checkout process. 

Optimizing Your eCommerce Checkout in 3 Steps

Your checkout process is the most important part of your eCommerce website, hands down. You’ve invested time and money in driving traffic to your site and moving customers through the buying journey, so the last thing you want is to lose them at the checkout. 

Are you seeing a lot of abandoned carts? Don’t panic just yet! Customers ditching their carts is pretty common, but this is still a number you should keep a close eye on. However, if you’re seeing a recent or growing spike in abandoned carts, you likely have a problem with your checkout process. Below, you’ll find the three areas we suggest optimizing so you don’t end up losing buyers at the tail end of the customer journey.

Design

When creating an eCommerce store, mobile responsiveness is the key to good design. A buyer shouldn’t struggle to view the pricing breakdown or enter their billing information just because they’re on their phone. They should be able to easily navigate to and from their cart and flow seamlessly into the checkout process. 

When designing your checkout experience, it’s important to consider your customers and their goals. 

3 Goals for Checkout Design

1. Fast Checkout: Every buyer is looking for the most efficient checkout possible, so use fewer forms and require fewer steps whenever possible. When they are ready to buy, people will want to be in and out as quickly as possible. Some great ways to do this is to offer guest checkout (more on this below) and avoid redirects, since they can be confusing and frustrating.
2. Flexible Cart: Some people will shop around and treat their carts like a “might buy” list, so they should be easy to modify and include a summary of product details. Make it easy for people to tell what size, colour and quantity they have in their cart, along with the product image to remind them of how much they want what’s in the cart. Being able to click back to the product page from the cart for a quick change of size or colour is a must, as are “Add” and “Remove” options. If you make people work too hard to update their cart, chances are they’ll abandon it all together.
3. Promo Codes: Redeeming coupons or applying promotions should be straightforward. When possible, automate the application of promo codes, either before site visitors start shopping, or during the checkout process. This helps people from forgetting to enter the code and prevents spelling errors, and goes a long way to improving trust and usability.

Ease of Use

Your mobile site should make purchasing as seamless as possible. Include both “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” buttons on product pages so buyers can move efficiently through your site. Some people just want that one item and they’re done, so a checkout option saves them the time spent going through the cart process. 

Not everyone buys right away, so adding a “Wishlist” or “Save for later” feature makes people less likely to forget about their items after some reflection time. You can later use this information in an email campaign to remind shoppers what they left behind. 

Finally, we all know that keeping track of various passwords can be a hassle. Offer social login as an option so that the people can get straight to shopping. While not everyone will use it, it will be appreciated by those who would otherwise drop off if they had to create yet another online account. 

Privacy

Data privacy and security are major concerns for netizens. Not only are their payment details at risk, so too are their personal details like email address, home address and IP address. While customer data can be valuable to companies, it’s important to let customers choose whether they create a profile or check out as a guest. Always make sure you are using a secure socket layer (SSL) on your ecommerce site to encrypt private data. Just having the https at the beginning of your web address is a trust indicator that will put shoppers at ease. You can also employ trust seals to add another layer of perceived security to your site’s checkout experience. 

Optimizing Mobile Checkout UX

There’s a lot to think about when optimizing your eCommerce site, whether you are creating a new store or updating an existing one. If you’d like some direction, schedule a free 30-minute consultation with one of our experts and we would be happy to review mobile optimization with you.