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5 Tips for Mobile Checkout Optimization

DynamicWeb

If you run an e-business, mobile checkout optimization is the way for you to increase sales and ensure your shopping carts aren’t abandoned by the large population of mobile shoppers.

The shopping carts have been set free. Once confined to grocery stores and dingy parking lots, shopping carts are now commonplace on the web. Not even confined to your personal computers, eCommerce is also booming on mobile devices. So if you run an e-business, mobile checkout optimization is the way for you to increase sales and ensure your shopping carts aren’t abandoned by the large population of mobile shoppers.

Optimization of the checkout process is important in general. You want to refine your website, so prospects become customers and customers become repeats. Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, has its own unique challenges due to the nature of these devices. With that in mind, here are 5 tips for mobile checkout optimization:

  1. Clear Calls-To-Action. With less screen real estate, mobile devices require extra clarity in what you want your potential customer to do and how they should do it.Buttons such as “Add to Cart” and “Begin Checkout” should stand out. It’s best practices to use obvious icons and bold colors that quickly convey information to your visitor. Big buttons are also preferable for touchscreens, rather than endless pinching, poking, and squeezing to zoom.
  2. Minimize Loading Time. Mobile devices give you, the vendor, less certainty as to the quality of your website visitor’s connection. 3G, 4G, LTE, WiFi, really bad hotel WiFi, etc. There’s a number of possibilities for how your customer connects to the web. Mobile checkout optimization is also about understanding the priority of website speed and respecting your customer’s time. Slow loading (by measures of milliseconds!) causes potential customers to abandon their shopping carts. Reduce images and minimize the amount of pages your visitors must click through to checkout with their purchase.
  3. Isolate the Checkout Area. Once your potential customer has entered into “The Checkout Zone” (slightly adjacent but unrelated to “The Twilight Zone”), you don’t want them to have any distractions. Remove links and other distractions that takes their eye off the primary goal, which is completing their purchase. While this is a tip useful for desktop ecommerce, isolating the checkout area is especially important for mobile checkout optimization because of the limited screen space.
  4. Allow Social Logins. At Dynamicweb, we are proponents of not forcing your customer to register before checking out. Customers don’t want to be forced into anything, and if you require a unique profile or login to buy, you risk losing a customer. Social logins, on the other hand, are perfect for personal mobile devices. It’s very possible that your customer is already signed into their social networks via their device anyway. And they may even want to share their purchase with their friends, family, and pet cat. Additionally, the ability to checkout as a Guest is appreciated as well.
  5. Reduce typing. It seems like the youth of today have no problem transcribing Charles Dickens on their smartphones, but for the rest of us, typing on a touchscreen keyboard can still be cumbersome. Mobile checkout optimization, then, is also accomplished by reducing the amount of typing your potential customer has to do in order to complete their order. As with our previous tip, the goal is to make it easier to buy and reduce the chance that your customer abandons their shopping cart. Dropdown menus, radio buttons, auto-fill locations, and form simplification all help reduce typing. And best of all, the touchscreen keyboard won’t take up half your screen!

We’re also here to help with any other questions or needs — email our team at info@dynamicweb.com.

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