3 Ways You’re Losing Money From Your Mobile E-Commerce
Roughly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout.
Your mobile shopping cart: Maybe it’s a problem you are leaving on the back burner. Maybe you’ve put it on your to-do list but haven’t taken action. The bottom line: each month you let pass without addressing UX problems in your mobile shopping cart is a month of potential revenue that is lost.
It’s undeniable that mobile is where people are. They’re posting, commenting, sharing, and buying. If you don’t think this affects you, take a look into your website’s analytics and get an idea of how many visits you’re receiving from mobile. How many are dropping off before their checkout is completed?
Do you know why? Or, are you just scared to face the facts?
Let’s discuss 3 reasons your e-commerce website is underperforming:
1. The “Add to Cart” Button Appears Only Once
On your mobile e-commerce site, the placement of your purchase button is key and can make a huge difference in your cart abandonment rate. It needs to be obvious that when your user presses this button, they are adding the currently-viewed item to their shopping cart. But, what if the user scrolls down, passing the product description? Will they see the “Add to Cart” button again? Or, is it only found in one place?
Smashing Magazine spent the better part of a year at Baymard Institute conducting a study on consumer behavior with mobile e-commerce sites. One of the main problems this study revealed: consumer confusion over the “Add to Cart” button. Of the websites used in the study, many had the “Add to Cart” button once, following the product description. However, when this button was NOT visible, shoppers were confused and began to use the “Shopping Cart” button instead. This resulted in users thinking they had actually added items to their cart when, in fact, they hadn’t.
To avoid confusing your mobile shoppers, your “Add to Cart” button should not only be distinguishable from the “Shopping Cart,” but also repeated more than once on the page to ensure the consumer can find it. The study from Smashing showed improved performance by adding an additional “Add to Cart” button at the bottom of every product page.
2. The Checkout Process Is Too Slow
One of the most frustrating experiences, as an Internet user, is watching the loader, progress bar, spinning wheel, (or whatever graphic representation you can think of) signifying that the site you’re on is taking too long to load.
Even worse: when you see that graphic during your checkout process.
When consumers want to buy something online, they want the process to be easy. Are your customers abandoning their purchases?
New studies suggest that slow load times are the number-one culprit in customers abandoning their carts. In a survey conducted by Brand Perfect, they found that more than half (51%) of those in the US said that site slowness is the top reason they’d abandon a purchase.
Even more profound: a similar study found that “just a 2-second delay in load time during checkout resulted in abandonment rates reaching as high as 87%.”
2 seconds! This proves the importance in optimizing your mobile UX. If your abandonment rate can reach 87% depending on just 2 seconds in load time, it would be wise to invest in consulting a UX designer and focus on the best ways to improve your mobile checkout process.
3. You Aren’t Investing in Your Mobile Customer
Perhaps you’ve heard the term UX but you’re not sure what it means. (Read what our CEO thinks about it here.) Chances are, you have more customers shopping from mobile devices than you think and you are probably not sure about what type of experience they’re having while shopping (aka: their UX). Let’s take a look at some surprising UX statistics:
- Problems during the payment process have forced two-thirds (66%) of [customers] to abandon their transactions
- Nearly half (47%) said they failed to complete a purchase because the checkout process took too long.
These are experience problems. Understanding the mobile architecture and customer behavior is key to solving them. Consulting a UX designer is an investment for you. Their expertise in mobile design in conjunction with user (customer) behaviors can eliminate problems like the ones provided above – saving you the loss of a sale.
In a case study from Designing for Success: Creating Business Value with Mobile User Experience (UX), it was found that analyzing the redesign of an e-commerce website with a strong focus on UX, the site saw:
- 30% increase in sales
- 50% decrease in bounce rate
- 70% increase in quantity of products sold
By approaching the redesign of your website with an analytical eye on UX, you might see a similar turn around in your sales. Let’s take this idea off the back-burner and be practical: it’s time to start capturing more sales.
