Remember the Motorola Razr? Or maybe the Chocolate from LG? Your hippest friends may have had a Blackberry (RIP ⚰️). Today, however, many of us basically tote around mini-computers in our pockets. The smartphone has excelled to the point where everything we want can be done in the palm of our hands, from depositing checks, deciphering who among us is an impostor, or up-and-coming favorite—shopping.

Mobile spending has exploded in popularity in recent years. Nearly 4 in 5 Americans (79%) shop on their phones and 76% shop more on their phone now than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital shops must be optimized for mobile consumers to keep pace with the competition.

But while optimization may seem as simple as making sure your product pics show up as the right size on a mobile screen, that’s not all it takes to create a great mobile shopping experience. You’ve worked hard to build a better customer experience when people shop your site on their laptops, and here are ways to make sure that carries through when they take your store on the go.

4 Common Customer Complaints With Mobile Shopping

While mobile has enjoyed bolstered popularity, consumers still find that some issues on mobile plague their overall shopping experience. Some brands have caught on and perfected their mobile shopping experience, and others still optimize for their desktop site while neglecting mobile entirely.

As mobile shopping continues its climb in popularity, it’s important to ensure that your brand’s experience doesn’t fall into these common mobile pitfalls:

1. Pinch and Zoom Woes

The number one qualm a third of consumers have with mobile is the need to constantly zoom your screen when shopping on a mobile device. Images should occupy about 50% of the screen, be clear and accurate, and have zoom capabilities, so shoppers don’t have to endure pinching and zooming through their experience.

2. Tiny Buttons, Big Fingers

It’s no secret—shoppers like big buttons. Are your CTAs too small? Similar to the zooming issue, users often report having issues clicking buttons on mobile devices. And since we weren’t all blessed with petite fingers, it’s a good idea to add a few pixels to the clickable space to create a buffer for easier clicking.

3. Limited Product Details

Don’t sacrifice product information for more space. Consumers still value your product descriptions and are willing to scroll for them, so don’t skimp on the details. Not only should your product description pages offer up all relevant information, but they should also have easy links to related detail pages like sizing charts.

4. Slow to Load, Fast to Bounce ✌️

Slow load times are often seen as inevitable, but consumers will churn quickly if your site won’t load—often within just a matter of seconds. For every one-second delay in page load time, conversions can fall by up to 20%, so let’s nip this lost revenue in the bud. Reducing file sizes, combining common code, and other measures can be taken to initiate faster load times.

5 Tips For A Better Mobile Customer Experience

Optimizing your mobile site for today’s smartphone shopper isn’t just for fun. It’s now table stakes. Two-thirds of companies are shifting to compete on customer experience, and a majority, 84% of companies that improve their experience see boosts in revenue.

Plus, 73% of customers say a good customer experience is key when choosing brands to stay loyal to, and loyal customers lead to lower acquisition costs and higher LTV. With consumers making more choices impacted by experience in lieu of pricing, shipping, and other factors, making sure your mobile experience meets beats expectations should be tops on your to-do list.

There are a number of strategies that brands can employ to differentiate their mobile shopping experience from the competition, ​​increase customer satisfaction, earn the loyalty of customers, and turn mobile into a top channel.

1. Create an Omnichannel Customer Experience

Align your customer journey on every channel. For instance, your desktop customer journey and mobile customer journey shouldn’t feel like journeys to two entirely different places. Your flow from acquisition to purchase to delivery should be equally seamless whether shoppers are converting on a desktop or on their phone.

2. Beef up Your Mobile Tech Stack

Add popular mobile apps to your mobile strategy. Instagram and Facebook are powerful ​​social media providers for mobile ecommerce businesses. This is where a lot of folks spend time on their phones, so it can help with retention since people tend to follow what they like. Through organic and paid social posts and a streamlined and frictionless experience, brands can drive traffic and conversions to your mobile site in just a click.

3. Get Personal

Personalize the mobile user experience for each shopper. Whether it’s through customer engagements, texts, personalized recs on your mobile site, or another mobile channel, be sure that you aren’t sending out cold, generic messages to your customers. Personalize their experiences from beginning to end to create better mobile engagements.

4. Every Part of the Experience Counts

Create a positive journey along every step of the digital customer experience, from discovery to delivery. Brands often overlook the post-purchase stage of the customer experience when it’s the most memorable part of the journey.

It’s the last touch between your brand and your customers, and if something goes awry, they’re not coming back. This means paying attention to what happens up to and beyond checkout, including delivery, tracking, and customer support should anything go wrong.Even though the vast majority of shoppers track their online purchases and experience some form of delivery anxiety, brands are quick to write these worries off as “part of online shopping” and ignore solutions that create a better customer experience. Integrations such as Route can ease customer worry and create more positive engagements between brands and customers without the need for an expensive app.

5. Empower Your Customers

Show your shoppers the tools that’ll help them give themselves the best experience possible. Encourage your customers to download the Route app to take advantage of real-time notifications and harness the ability to track all of their online purchases in a single location. Tracking down tracking numbers is a pain — alleviate that with a single source of truth for where all their purchases are.

Make the Mobile Customer Experience A Priority For Your Modern Shoppers

There are a multitude of strategies that brands can use to differentiate themselves from the pack and create a standout mobile experience. But the truth of 2020 and beyond is that mobile is a critical part of any ecommerce strategy. If brands only focus on the “traditional” (at least by ecommerce standards) channels, they risk losing out on more than half of online shoppers. If their mobile sites are finicky and hard to use, users will churn quickly. 

But if their mobile site is streamlined, personalized, and full of positive experiences, shoppers will come back time and time again. Check out our eBook14 Ways to Optimize Your EcommerceWebsite for more information on how mobile is a critical part of your ecommerce strategy.

Mobile Customer Experience FAQs