Should I optimise my eCommerce site for mobile devices?

With the introduction of smartphones and more recently the iPad, it’s starting to become clear that if you have an online store, you should think seriously about ensuring people can transact easily with these devices.

We’re seeing that all of our eCommerce clients are receiving orders from people who are using their smartphones and new iPads. See one example below:

As you can see from the screenshot above, in the last two weeks, three people have purchased products using their iPhone (which I find surprising to be honest) and two using their iPad.

You can find this report in Google Analytics by going to Visitors > Mobile > Mobile devices.

Compared to the site average, the conversion rate is lower, as is the average value, etc, but it’s still meaningful, and can probably be attributed to the fact that the site hasn’t been optimised for these devices.

If we were to make the site more “mobile friendly” we might see those numbers improve. I also genuinely expect that as more people purchase smartphones and iPads the trend will continue to rise. We’ve seen an exponential rise in traffic from mobiles over the last 18 months.

Obviously there are steps you can take to ensure your eCommerce site is eCommerce friendly.

The most obvious is to browse your site using your own or a borrowed iPad or smartphone and try and make a purchase. Make notes about the things preventing you from achieving your goal.

You’ll probably find the most common issues arise from navigation links being too small, too close together and fiddly to ‘tap’ or the use of flash. For example, those fancy 360° rotating product views often don’t work on mobiles which don’t support Flash.

Make sure you also go right through the checkout process too, looking for formatting problems, etc.

For smaller, medium-sized eCommerce retailers using out-of-the-box software solutions, it’s really up to you to lean on your provider to create an updated version of their product to support mobile friendly versions of their product. For open source users, let’s hope the community gets behind HTML 5 fast (I’m sure they will).

If this is important to you, check this excellent article over at eConsultancy (the inspiration for today’s post). It has lots more screenshots and examples.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.