It is not possible to spend even a day without a mobile phone anymore. It has revolutionized our lives so much that even children can operate mobile devices, access the internet, and shop for their project requirements online.
More than half of the world is opting for mobiles as their primary device for connecting to the internet or for shopping, and the numbers are on the rise every day.
To capitalize on this situation, the old approach of websites focusing primarily on desktop users for traffic has fallen out of use. You need a mobile-first approach that focuses on this growing audience if you want to build your e-commerce store.
What is a Mobile-First Approach and Why You Need It?
As the name suggests, Mobile-first is prioritizing on mobile as the base while designing and developing your e-commerce store. As most people shop on the go while relying on shopping urges, their interest decreases if they find a poorly formatted shopping site that feels unresponsive. Hence, it would be best if you optimized your shopping store to suit mobile devices.
While designing for mobile devices, you need to hire a mobile app developer who knows screen rotation, screen size, memory, and bandwidth problems in and out, things which you never needed to worry about from a desktop standpoint. As a fact, a mobile-first site works better on all devices.
How a Mobile-First Approach Helps Build a Great eCommerce Store
Create a Great User Experience
The first thing that you need to think about is developing a good user experience for everyone who visits your eCommerce website. Customers will be uncomfortable with a layout that is too difficult to navigate with tons of buttons, and whatnot.
Make sure that your site is optimized for mobiles. Remove unnecessary content, work on scaling and navigation, make sure that the tap items are spaced far apart, and pay attention to the text’s readability.
Consumers prefer a simple, user-friendly store, and changing a desktop site to a mobile store is challenging and often complicates matters.
If users are happy and find your store easy to navigate, they will find the user-friendly site irresistible and always return to your website for purchases.
Optimize Your Images
If your pictures are not optimized, it will result in higher downtime, and your potential customers will just run to a competitor’s website.
If you feel that low-quality, light, and vector images are making your website look unprofessional, you can use pictures that look good even in a smaller size or crop out unnecessary portions. However, this does not seem like a real solution. To overcome this situation, you should start optimizing your images.
Some software allows you to compresses images without lowering its resolution. Hence, the pictures appear sharp and can provide high-end resolution in mobile display and load faster. It will help improve your eCommerce business’s conversion rate since your images determine your site’s worth.
Offer Videos
Nobody wants to scroll through pages to learn about a product these days. The present generation is all about viewers, and less about readers, and this is profoundly true even in the eCommerce business.
To keep your audience engaged, you can do the same in a video format explaining your perspective in a more engaging and organized way. Generally, eCommerce websites having videos enjoy a higher conversion rate as compared to text-only sites. It also helps your website to rank higher in search engines, which leads to higher traffic. V
ideos can boost your marketing campaigns by influencing your viewers to make quick decisions. So, it’s a good idea to plan your marketing strategies with videos.
Make Search Easier
A good custom site search option is essential if you have an eCommerce store since you want users to check the list of all products that you are offering.
If it is too difficult to find the search bar, or if the search bar is too small, unclickable, or unresponsive, you will not be able to show your audience all the awesome collections you have on your store. In this way, you will lose potential buyers for your product.
To eliminate these problems, make sure that the search button is visible and responsive. You can also offer voice search since many people use it these days to multi-task while shopping.
Quicker Load Times and Conversion
Loading time is a priority for users, and often, even sites with great content and quality products suffer because of their load times. A rule of thumb states that if the total site load time is longer than four seconds, users will move elsewhere.
Additionally, if the site has a very high load time, your site may not even be listed on the first page of the search results, since Google Analytics has switched to a mobile-first approach.
Focus on the quicker conversion of the customer, offering them secure checkout in less than three steps. Offer multiple payment gateways, so that users are free to opt for whichever they want.
Remove Interstitial and Pop-Up Ads
Pop-up ads and interstitial ads on your eCommerce increase your load time while providing nothing of value. It may also be why your potential customers are running away from your site frustrated, vowing never to shop at your store again.
Pop up ads can make you lose credibility and cause debt in your relations with potential buyers. Hence, you must pay close attention to these details while working on your mobile-first site.
Allow Gestures and Code Snippets
Sometimes, a user may want to look at an image of a particular product, but if they click on the image, it will start loading the image in a larger size, which may cause distortions. Allowing the user to pinch in for zooming can save you the time it takes to load the picture.
Rich Snippets by Google allows the users to view your ratings, reviews, and some details about your site directly while searching on their browser. It will enable you to make a first impression with customers, who will genuinely trust your website.
How To Create A Professional eCommerce Store?
While the above tips will help, you need to hire a professional to create a trustworthy eCommerce Store. With the rise of Python as a breakthrough development platform for mobile sites, you can also look for python developers to help you out.