4 Ways to Improve Mobile Commerce Performance in 2015
Here are four ways that retailers can boost m-commerce sales in 2015:
1. Improve your users' mobile shopping experiences by doing the following:
- Put a premium on speed. If you think people want a fast user experience on their desktop, mobile takes it to another level. Consumers won't tolerate a slow-loading mobile shopping experience. Therefore, if your mobile pages take longer than three seconds to load after five runs, you must improve it. Mobile page loading times can be improved through the site's architecture, optimizing resources and using a content delivery network.
- Improve navigation. Make it easy for shoppers to find what they're looking for by making the navigation work like it's an application. Use a swipe feature and make the most used elements fixed and visible.
- Create an effective search experience. If your shoppers can search an item (e.g., short sleeve red shirt) and get exactly what they're looking for, it's the fastest way to browse your site. A better user experience will enable your mobile shoppers to transact faster, increasing sales, repeat purchases and revenue.
2. Manage traffic peaks. While we're on the subject of user experience, it's important to remember to manage traffic peaks to ensure that fast-loading pages occur when traffic surges during sales and busy shopping periods. M-commerce bandwidth can be managed to ensure that there are enough servers/bandwidth supporting peak shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Beyond these peak days, marketing and IT need to coordinate promotions to ensure that IT is well-prepared to support additional traffic surges which are brought on by marketing campaigns via email, radio, TV and other media. Beyond slow-loading pages, traffic peaks may also result in "denial of service," so retailers need to take traffic management seriously.
3. Manage inventory and promotions. Retailers also need to manage product inventory, particularly around promotions. This is particularly critical around peak shopping days like Black Friday, when thousands of shoppers put items in their shopping carts, many of which are never purchased. Determine a policy for how long items can be held in a shopping cart. Given the number of digital and physical commerce channels used today, retailers need to analyze and optimize inventory and promotions to ensure that performance is maximized to improve user experience and, ultimately, sales.
4. Make mobile personal. We take our mobile devices into the bedroom and bathroom because they're our most personal devices. Yet too many retailers fail to bring this same level of personalization to the mobile shopping experience. Therefore, my most strategic recommendation for improving mobile commerce in 2015 is to make the mobile shopping experience personal.
Today, retailers know a lot about their customers, yet fail to properly integrate that data across channels to ensure that the mobile shopping experience is personal. For existing e-commerce customers, billing and shipping details should be personalized with the first mobile shopping visit to increase checkout ease and speed. Furthermore, the mobile browsing experience should provide fast and direct access to the product categories frequented by each customer, with relevant upsell and cross-sell options. Retailers with physical locations nearby should make it easy to promote in-store visits as an additional way to make a purchase.
Mobile shopping equaled and even exceeded PC-based shopping for many retailers in 2014. With the successes and failures of this holiday shopping season still fresh in our minds, now is the time to plot the course for 2015 as mobile becomes the leading digital commerce channel.
Yigal Carmy is a co-founder at JustDomobi, a provider of custom mobile commerce websites
