What device do you use when you want to do some online shopping? Your answer might be your smartphone, which makes you one of the most online shoppers that use their smartphones for shopping. We cannot talk about today’s modern consumers without taking a close look at the mobile shopping experience. The trend of using phones to browse, connect and shop online is increasing, so as a business it’s crucial to ensure that you offer a smooth and user-friendly mobile shopping experience to your customers. 

However, if your customers encounter an unresponsive website, loads slowly, or has a confusing interface, chances are they may abandon their shopping cart and take their business elsewhere. Thankfully, there’s nothing lost. There are various ways to keep customers engaged and motivated to complete their purchases. All you need to do is to find the issues and implement some simple modifications that will improve the mobile shopping experience. 

In this article, we will take a look at the significance of mobile shopping in the world of e-commerce and share five techniques with you that can help you improve your customers’ mobile shopping experience. Let’s begin!

1. Speed up your website

Before you do anything, check the loading time of your website. This is key. The most important thing you can do to encourage your customers to stay on your website, browse your online store and make a purchase is by ensuring that your website is fast. If you cannot guarantee this, you’re in trouble. You really need to try everything to speed up your website in order to improve the mobile shopping experience for your customers. Even a minor improvement of 0.1 seconds in site speed can result in increased sales. 

Luckily, there are various measures you can take to avoid slow loading times and speed up your website. For example, you can optimize your website’s images using an image compressor like TinyPNG. It may also be helpful to use lighter plugins and themes and minimize CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files on your website. There are lots of tools for this purpose that can compress the code on your site, and enhance the mobile shopping experience for your visitors, which is exactly what you are looking for.

2. Optimize the design of your online store

Another important thing you can do to improve the mobile shopping experience is to optimize your website for mobile devices. This is a must, without any questions. It is a crucial element you cannot forget about. Optimizing the design of your online store involves modifying the content of your pages for smaller screens, and making sure that all pages are easy to navigate from mobile devices. 

To achieve this, it is essential to ensure that your pages contain only essential information, yet customers can easily find what they are looking for. This will enable visitors to browse your store and purchase your products without encountering any distractions or hurdles. To offer user-friendly site navigation, you should also try to incorporate accordion menus. An accordion menu is a brief list of items such as main pages and categories, which can be clicked to reveal additional content such as subcategories. 

3. Accessibility is key

Another key aspect to consider when it comes to improving the mobile shopping experience is accessibility. We cannot emphasize enough how important it is to ensure that customers with auditory, visual, and cognitive disabilities can interact with your website’s content. A simple way to do this is by providing alt text for product photos. When you upload images for your products, write an alt text in which you describe what the image is about. This can come in handy in case the image cannot be loaded. In this event,  the browser will display the alt text, and screen readers will utilize it to describe the image to visually impaired visitors. An easy and simple way to improve the customer experience, so why should you not take advantage of it? 

4. Offer safe and simple payment methods

Now, this one is one of the most important things to consider. Keep in mind, customers will abandon their shopping carts in a second if they do not trust your website’s security. The best you can do is to provide your customers with various popular payment options. Make sure to include digital wallets such as PayPal and Google Pay as well. For this purpose, you can use a plugin such as WP Simple Pay that will allow you to add secure payment options to your WordPress site. 

Another simple thing that can enhance the mobile shopping experience is creating a smooth and straightforward checkout process. Once your customers are ready to finish the purchase and send their order, there should be nothing stopping them. In case you have a WooCommerce webshop, you can easily customize your checkout page exactly the way you want it. Aim for simple forms and always request only the necessary information from your shoppers. 

5. Do not forget about search functionality 

To provide a good mobile shopping experience, it is also essential to consider search functionality. This means ensuring that customers can easily find the products they are looking for. To facilitate this, all you need to add is a search icon to all the pages that give visitors swift access to the items they desire. Other than that, you can also implement smart predictive search terms. These can save users time and effort by reducing the need to type lengthy phrases. These fixes are simple, yet they can enhance the mobile shopping experience and take the shopper’s journey to the next level. 

Final Thoughts

We think it won’t be surprising when we say that a great mobile shopping experience is key to building trust and credibility, increasing your sales, and offering your customers a smooth user experience while doing business with you. As a business owner, you need a strong online presence and that means various things. You need a high-quality website that loads fast, well-written copy, quality images, a strong marketing strategy, and so on. There’s a lot to consider, for sure. And that also means that there is always room for improvement, especially when it comes to enhancing the customer experience for mobile shoppers. Now let’s sum up what we discussed in this article and what are the 5 most effective ways to improve the mobile shopping experience for your customers:

1. Improve the speed of your site by using special plugins and tools
2. Optimize the design of your online store to ensure easy navigation and uncluttered pages displayed on mobile devices.
3. Ensure accessibility by incorporating a plugin like WP Accessibility to help users with auditory, visual, and cognitive disabilities interact with your content.
4. Provide secure and straightforward payment options that people trust like PayPal and Google Pay.
5. Implement search functionality on your website to help your customers quickly find the products they are looking for.

We hope our list helped to understand how easily you can improve the shopping experience for your mobile users! For more tips and tricks, browse our blog and learn more about WordPress, SEO, marketing, and other topics! See you in the next one!