In today’s digital world where everyone’s glued to their smartphones, mobile commerce is the secret sauce for Shopify store owners to gain success over consumers. Then what is mobile commerce? It is the act of buying and selling goods through handheld devices like smartphones or tablets, without needing a personal computer.
Whatever it is you are selling, optimizing your Shopify store’s mobile commerce experience can keep customers clicking “buy now” from their devices. Ready to level up on the small screen? Here is all you need to know about Shopify Mobile Commerce.
How Optimized Mobile Commerce Helps Your Shopify Store Succeed
Here are some key statistics to help you understand why you should keep an eye on mobile commerce for Shopify stores.
- Mobile commerce in the U.S is expected to reach 856 billion dollars in 2027
- Approximately 30% of global online shoppers use mobile commerce weekly
- 97% of the U.S population or nearly 309 million households own at least one smartphone
- 97% of young adults (age 18-29) claim to own a smartphone, while 76% of people over 76 also own one.
- In the US, mobile commerce spending makes up nearly 38% of all digital spending.
Numbers don’t lie, mobile commerce has now become an essential part of global consumers, and the number of users finding and interacting with your website through smartphones will only go up.
Optimized Shopify mobile commerce helps ensure a well-responsive look, improved site speed, and easy-to-use navigation. This approach leads to a dozen of benefits, including:
– Better customer experience: Optimization for mobile commerce makes your Shopify store easy to navigate and use on smartphones. This results in more purchases and encourages customers to come back to your store.
– Increased conversions: A mobile-optimized store can increase conversion and sales. Consumers spend a lot of time on their smartphones and would love to easily browse, and purchase products from their handheld devices.
– More competitive advantage: Mobile shopping is becoming the norm. If your Shopify store can lead by being more mobile-friendly, you can stay competitive and meet modern shoppers’ needs.
– Improved search engine rankings: Google has listed mobile adaptability as one of the important factors for search rankings. Optimizing your Shopify store for mobile can help increase traffic to the website.
– More creative solutions: The power of the internet brings many new technologies to smartphones, such as various payment options or location-based services. You can continually improve your mobile website or app to serve customers.
How To Optimize Shopify Mobile Commerce
1. Use A Responsive Layout For Mobile
Responsiveness is the practice of adapting the website’s layout for various screen sizes. Your Shopify store should look good, accessible, and interactive on any mobile device, whether they are Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, or even some older models.
- Here are some tips to create a responsive layout for your Shopify website:
- Make sure your website layout is maintained on all screen sizes and avoid leaving any part of content out of frame.
- Use fixed dimensions for images and videos to avoid changes in size since they are constantly resized when the screen
- dimension changes.
- Avoid editing content by inserting new content that can break the previous layout.
- Use CSS and animations to create smooth transition effects between states and avoid layout shifts.
2. Simplify The Navigation
If your Shopify website has many pages or products, navigation on the desktop can already be challenging, not to mention on mobile. To help customers find what they need, your navigation system should be optimized for whichever device consumers use.
A visitor wants to quickly know your products or services without wasting time, and an easy-to-navigate navigation structure can help visitors find where to go and even stay longer. The mobile version of the navigation structure should be compact, simple, and ready to access with links to vital pages and information.
Make sure you test your navigation on different screen sizes, devices, and browsers to ensure it is responsive well on all platforms.
3. Optimize Images And Videos For Mobile
Shopify themes often allow users to upload desktop and mobile images separately so they fits well on any device. You need to optimize images with correct dimensions and sizes so they would fit small screens while not increasing page load time.
Another tip is to try compressing images and videos to reduce the file size, without compromising the quality. Optimized images and videos for Shopify mobile commerce help ensure that content is accessible and engaging to users. In addition, a mobile-friendly Shopify theme can be helpful in creating a fitting website for handheld devices.
4. Adapt Texts For Mobile
Mobile devices have much less limited space than desktops or tablets so you need to find a way to showcase information about products while ensuring readability.
The most effective approach is to have dedicated font sizes for smaller screen devices. While too small size can be hard to read, too big size can ruin the layout. The common font size for body text on mobile is around 14px to 16px.
Moreover, your choice of font family is also important in ensuring reliability on mobile devices. San-serif fonts like Helvetica and Arial are usually more legible for handheld smartphones while serif fonts like Georgia or Merriweather provide a more classy look. A responsive e-commerce web design should be able to adjust the font size and layout to have the best look on all devices.
You can also optimize the amount of text on your mobile site by using short paragraphs, bullet points, headings, and other elements. Try not to use unnecessary details on your mobile device, and focus on showcasing your information most clearly and concisely. Images or infographics are also very helpful in making the content easy to understand on mobile devices.
5. Improve The Speed Of Mobile
Speed is highly important for your Shopify website to rank well on search ranking engines like Bing or Google. Slow loading may also make visitors leave, increasing the site’s bounce rate.
Here are some tips to speed up your Shopify website, whether on mobile or desktop:
- Minimize code and remove unnecessary parts such as unused stylesheets or scripts.
- Optimize images and videos (as mentioned above) by compressing files to reduce sizes
- Use a CDN (content delivery network) to better distribute content to worldwide servers, therefore reducing load times for users from other regions
- Enable browser caching to store some data on user devices, making the pages load faster the next time they visit.
- Load above-the-fold content first such as logo or navigation menu (also called lazy load) to give visitors a sense of progress while the loading speed is ensured.
6. Take Advantage Of Available Tools
Shopify is a well-known e-commerce platform, which means it and third-party companies provide many solutions that you can use to create an enjoyable shopping experience on mobiles. Here are some tools that you can take a look at:
Shop Pay – Shop Pay is an official payment solution from Shopify to receive transactions, store payment data, and create a one-step checkout process. Other payment methods like Apple Pay, Venmo, Google Pay, Paypal, should also be provided on mobile.
Shipping tracker – It would be more convenient for customers to track their orders right on their smartphones. Customers can install the Shopify Shop app on the order’s status page to track the shipping process, but only when they are in the U.S, Canada, U.K, or Australia.
POS – By using POS for Shopify, merchants can speed up the customer checkout process while managing payment, order, and inventory right on the POS (using a mobile, iPad, or PC). Customers can enjoy a flexible shopping experience by buying online and picking up at the store, where their order is handled and synced seamlessly through the POS system.
Popups – Popups are a great tool to capture visitor’s attention on mobile and help increase subscribers, notify them about sales, or remind them of cart abandonment. You can use a Shopify app like Pop Convert or Smile to customize the Popups for handheld devices.
Shopify themes – Shopify theme store provides more than 200 themes, all of which ensure a good look for your Shopify store on mobile. You can also find Shopify themes from other marketplaces like ThemeForest or Envato.
Upcoming Mobile Commerce Trends To Look Out For
Mobile app
A native mobile app shopping experience can be the game changer for your e-commerce digital marketing strategy. Compared to websites, apps are faster, more stable, and loaded with technology to create a seamless shopping experience.
Social
Since customers are already spending time on social media, it only makes sense to promote products on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and more. You can link your catalogs to social media profiles and customers can purchase without leaving the social media platforms.
Chatbot
Chatbots, with AI power, can now act as a shopping assistant on mobile devices. More than that, chatbots can also connect data through platforms to strengthen the omnichannel selling strategy.
Conclusion
Shopify mobile commerce is only going to grow, so taking a step now is essential. To maximize the impact of your Shopify store, a mobile-optimized Shopify website would be the secret sauce that keeps your sales sizzling. Success is only a swipe away, and GroupFractal’s Shopify web design service is always available to help.