Optimizing Your E-commerce Platform For Mobile Users

Mobile shopping is expected to account for 60% of e-commerce sales by 2024. That means if you run an e-commerce business, you should have a mobile-optimized platform or platforms. If your site isn't easy to use on a mobile device, you're not just losing potential sales—you're also dropping off Google's radar since mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor.

Optimizing your e-commerce platform for mobile users means creating a smooth and enjoyable shopping experience. This involves improving site speed, navigation, and a whole lot more, ultimately helping you attract and convert more mobile customers.

In this guide, we'll cover the following areas you need to focus on to make your e-commerce platform a mobile-friendly powerhouse:

Understanding mobile user behavior
Designing for mobile
Improve mobile site speed
Enhancements to make the mobile shopping experience better
Mobile SEO

By honing in on these, your online store will not just attract folks shopping on their phones but also ensure they stick around, helping you rake in more sales and build a loyal customer base.

Understanding mobile user behavior

When it comes to shopping, mobile users prefer doing it in between other activities, like during a commute. They also have the general following behaviors:

Mobile shoppers are more likely to make impulse purchases.
With so many distractions, mobile users want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. They won’t stick around if a site is slow or complicated.
Mobile users also often look for stores, products, or services near their current location.
Because they are on their phones, mobile users now also often discover products through social media.

Knowing these, you need to make sure your e-commerce platform is:

Fast: Pages need to load in 3 seconds or less to keep a mobile shopper’s attention.
Simple: A clean, straightforward design helps users find what they need without hassle. One example of this is AllBirds.
Convenient: Features like "save for later", guest checkout, and easy access to reviews help meet mobile users' needs for quick, informed decisions. For example, Shopify has a "quick view" option that allows mobile users to easily tap and see product details without navigating away from the product list.

All these cater to the impulsive and fast-paced nature of mobile shopping. Once you get these features, you’ll be able to provide a shopping experience that aligns with their preferences and get you more sales in the process.

Design for mobile first

Now, how can you make a simple and appealing platform design happen? Well, the best thing to do is start with a "mobile-first" design philosophy. This approach is about prioritizing the mobile experience to ensure mobile device-using shoppers have a smooth, enjoyable journey on your site.

Here’s how to apply “mobile-first” effectively:

Your site should be responsive or automatically adjusts to fit the screen size of any device, be it a smartphone, tablet, or desktop. Use flexible grids and layouts to ensure your content looks great and is fully functional, no matter the device. Images and text should resize and reflow to fit the screen without requiring users to zoom or scroll horizontally.
Ensure that you have touch-friendly interfaces. Buttons, links, and navigation menus should be easy to tap with a finger and large enough to prevent mis-taps and spaced well apart. This is especially important for key actions like “Add to Cart” or “Checkout” to prevent frustration and abandoned carts.
Implement a simplified, intuitive navigation structure that makes browsing categories or searching for products easy. Consider a fixed or sticky menu that stays visible as users scroll, offering constant, easy access to navigation. Drop-down or hamburger menus can also save space and keep your design clean.

Improving mobile site speed

As mentioned earlier, it’s not just about the design. Your site should load quickly to counter mobile users’ short attention spans. Focus on the following things so that your mobile site will load faster, which leads to happier visitors and more sales:

Big, detailed images can make your site drag—keep things quick by shrinking images without losing their look. Use JPEG for photos and PNG for graphics. Tools like TinyPNG help make files smaller so they load faster. Also, use lazy loading, so images only load when they're about to be seen, not all at once.
Leverage browser caching. This trick stores parts of your site on the user's device for a while. In case they leave and then come back, your site pops up faster because the browser doesn't need to load everything again. You can set this up in your web server's settings to keep images, CSS, and JavaScript ready for repeat visitors.
Make CSS, JavaScript, and HTML leaner by cutting out spaces, breaks, and comments to make files smaller and quicker to load. Tools like UglifyJS (for JavaScript) and CSSNano (for CSS) can help.

Enhancing the mobile shopping experience

You may now have a minimalist website that loads pretty fast—but so do plenty of your competitors. How do you stand out even further? The answer lies in adding features that make shopping on your platform not just convenient, but a no-brainer, such as:

Incorporate an easy-to-use search bar with predictive text and autocorrect errors. This allows shoppers to find what they're looking for with just a few taps. Also, including filter and sort options helps users narrow their search quickly—Adidas is an example of a website that has this.
Streamline the process of checking out by reducing the number of pages and fields to fill out. Remember, on mobile, every extra step is an opportunity for the customer to drop off.
Not everyone wants to set up an account just to make a purchase. Offering a guest checkout option caters to these users, removing a potential barrier to sale.
Incorporate popular mobile payment options like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. These services streamline payment by allowing users to pay with mobile devices using stored payment information. It also removes the hassle of entering credit card details manually, which can be especially tedious on a mobile device.

Mobile SEO strategies

Do you know one more thing that can help your business stand out? Mastering mobile SEO so that your platform is easy to find when someone's searching on their mobile device. Here's how you can boost your mobile visibility:

Keep content concise and readable on small screens. Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and large, legible fonts.
As mentioned above, plenty of mobile searches are local. Use local keywords in your content, get listed in local business directories, and ensure your business details are consistent across the web. Don't forget to optimize your Google My Business listing with accurate information and photos to improve your visibility in local search results.
A fast site is a friend to mobile users and search engines alike. Compress images, minify code, and leverage browser caching to shave off every millisecond you can from your load times. Google rewards sites that provide a speedy experience, so this is key for climbing up those mobile search rankings.

Final Thoughts

To sum things up, making your online store work well on phones isn't just a nice thing to do—it's a must. As we talked about in this article, your main goal is to make it easy for people to browse, decide, and buy from their phones, since that's how most people shop these days.

One last thing to remember? Your online store is always growing and changing, which means there's always room for improvement. By staying flexible and paying attention to what your customers need and how technology is changing, you'll be able to stay ahead of your competitors in the world of mobile shopping.