5 Ways to Boost Your Mcommerce Sales in 2017

Shopping has definitely gone mobile. The Thanksgiving holiday sale last year revealed that most of the sales traffic of top ecommerce sites like Amazon and Target came from mobile devices. Adobe estimated that mobile sales hit $1 billion during the holiday weekend. This trend is also reflected worldwide with Alibaba’s Singles’ Day sales record hitting $17.79 billion in China where more than 80 percent of sales coming from mobile devices.

With mobile becoming the preferred transaction channel, ecommerce ventures would do well improving their mobile storefronts. Needless to say, offering a mobile-friendly website is a must and creating a mobile app is becoming a necessity. Startups could even be at an advantage if they choose to start out with a mobile-first orientation.

Thankfully, most of the design themes and templates now support responsive designs that adopt to each viewer’s screen size. This allows smaller ventures with existing sites could cope without having to perform major overhauls. Nonetheless, m-commerce sites could use some tweaks in order to improve shopping experience. Here are 5 tweaks to make in your site to boost your ecommerce sales.

Use a CDN to speed up load times

A Google study revealed that more than half of visitors abandon sites that load for more than 3 seconds. A way to achieve this is to optimize the site, invest on better hosting, and integrate your site to a content delivery network (CDN).

A CDN improves site performance by caching site resources such as scripts and images in distributed servers all around the globe. This reduces the loading lag that occurs when browsers fetch resources from your server.

Using a CDN also lessens the need to scrimp on image quality due to progressive rendering and hosting or bandwidth restrictions. Using sharp product photos instead of small blurry ones improves product appeal.

Allow various search and sort filters

Once on your site, customers must be able to find the products they’re looking for. While having prominent and well-structured navigation and product categories help, most users would default to using your search features.

First of all, make sure that your search bar is prominent. Some online stores make the mistake of losing the search somewhere in the navigation bar. Feature it prominently at the top part of your mobile site’s home page. Enable search suggestions too for a quicker experience.

When displaying search results, allow for the use of various search filters such as brand, price range, and color so that customers can narrow down the choices. You don’t want to overwhelm them to the point that they can’t make a buying decision. You could even pin the filter options either at the top of the screen as the user scrolls down the results or as a floating button to invoke the filters through a sidebar.

Write useful product descriptions

Product descriptions serve a couple of purposes on e-commerce sites. First, it has to communicate product features and benefits. With the absence of a store clerk, the description essentially takes care of the “sales talk” for the product. Second, product descriptions also help your store’s pages to rank well on search engines.

The challenge of performing both functions is even greater for mobile since you don’t want to have a boring wall of text for your product descriptions. Descriptions should be concise without sacrificing appeal and the identity of your store. Be as sensory as possible.

Bullet points help for the basic details such as shipping dimensions, weight, and the like. However, few people can visualize an inch so use familiar things as references e.g. arm length. Use powerful titles and intersperse keywords in the body to help with SEO.

Encourage product reviews

There’s a reason why Amazon is giving Google a scare when it comes to product search as more people default to the e-commerce giant as a starting point. Amazon’s rich product information and reviews gives buyers a quick snapshot of what a product is like and how much does it usually go for.

While product descriptions give buyers the essentials, product reviews give a better picture what it’s like to actually use and live with a product. For some items like consumer electronics, more than half of buyers consider insights from their peers as part of their decision making.

However, it is often a challenge to encourage buyers to leave reviews for their purchases. Consider getting online marketing services to create user-generated product reviews.

Provide one-click or single-page checkouts

A complicated checkout process is often a reason for shoppers to abandon their online shopping carts so providing a speedy and simple checkout process is a must. A multi-page checkout process can turn off buyers who are still on the fence about a purchase.

If you are using turnkey e-commerce scripts like OpenCart or WooCommerce, consider getting an add-on or plugin that enables a one-click or single page checkout. Many such scripts don’t provide this feature by default.

Be sure to be upfront with the payment details as well. Don’t surprise customers with fees that only become apparent upon checkout. At the home page, prominently display what payment methods you support.

Better experience, better sales

Your mobile site or app is the equivalent of a physical store and your staff all rolled into one when it comes to interfacing with your customers. Making site tweaks that create a speedy and worry-free mobile shopping experience makes it more likely for them to see the transaction through.

Rotem Gal is the VP of Marketing for InboundJunction