A Beautiful Site, We're Happy Tonight, Shopping in a Mobile Wonderland...
There are approximately 11 million smartphone users in the UK and over 15% of these are expected to browse retail sites over the forthcoming Christmas period.
According to Global Mobile Statistics 2011 from MobiThinking, 1 in 7 searches are now conducted by mobile. This makes sense; our phones are readily available to us, conducting a search takes a matter of seconds so it’s easy to see why around 50% of mobile searches lead to purchase.
More and more retailers are realising the potential that a mobile compatible site can bring, but for those who are yet to ‘see the light’, the recently launched GOMO by Google shows retailers how their current site would look as a mobile friendly site.
In a survey carried out by Limelight Networks, users highlighted the following as the three key factors that retailers should take into account when setting up a mobile site:
- 88% said the time it takes for the site to load or appear on the screen as extremely important or important
- 88% said detailed product images on the site as extremely important or important
- 82% said mobile site optimisation, such as removing the need to side-scroll, as extremely important or important.
Should these three factors be absent from the user’s experience, mobile retailers can expect to see a rise in the number of abandoned searches and baskets where users will instead turn to competitors to complete a mobile transaction. As obvious as this may be, a fully transactional mobile site should also be simple to use. A quarter of UK consumers who shopped online last Christmas experienced problems, highlighting the need for mobile sites to be even simpler to use in order to ensure customer loyalty.
In this busy period, customers want to be able to shop when and where they want, whether on the commute, in their lunch break, or in the evening after seeing a product advertised on TV. Retailers need to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Boots, New Look and Argos and bring an easy, enjoyable Christmas shopping experience to their customers in the form of mobile.