8 Tips to Boost Mobile eCommerce Sales This Holiday Season

The holiday season is a time that brings many memorable and cherishing moments — and it’s also one of the busiest times for retailers, as people hunt for the perfect (last-minute) gifts for their near and dear ones.

Consumers will encounter countless special offers, discounts, and door-buster deals promoted by merchants who aim to attract customers, increase sales, and get a piece of the holiday pie during this period. If you haven’t generated the highest e-commerce sales in the past few weeks, you may want to have a look at 11 reasons why your eCommerce website may be failing to convert.

With mobile devices being smarter and more convenient, people increasingly place orders using their mobile devices. It is essential to also keep m-commerce shoppers in mind when preparing for the holiday shopping season. In this high time of holiday sales, you have to optimize your mobile store as well.

infographic by DirectAgents

The experience and expectation on mobiles is different from desktops. There’s the obviously smaller screen, touch input, and portrait view. Most computer users are creating while most mobile users are consuming. You need to be extra smart and engaging, to gain their attention, limit frustration and truly enhance the experience. This is particularly true during this busy holiday season.

Let’s have a look at how you can optimize your mobile site for holiday sales.

1. Flawless Navigation

Mobile holiday shoppers usually look for gifts ideas. They stay on sites that are pleasant to look at, trustworthy, and easy to navigate. If they like what they see, they’ll be more likely to convert. You should also think about including quick access to a curated selection of potential gifts on your mobile homepage to provide visitors who are just starting their buying journey with an easy way in.

The buttons and links must be easily clickable without affecting any other links or buttons.

Making your main CTA-buttons around 45-57 pixels wide (finger-sized), will make it much easier for mobile shoppers to hit them. It doesn’t slow them down, as they don’t have to pay extra attention to hit the button accurately.

Place the buttons where they are easy to reach in one handed (49%), cradled (39%) and two-handed (15%) mode – UX Matters.

Use a navigation menu pattern that is accessible and lets shoppers perform the most frequent tasks without hassle:

  • Hamburger menus: you have a site that is mainly used for thematic browsing with a large menu with many options (e.g. clothing store with many product categories).
  • Navigation bars and tab bars: they can take up a lot of valuable real estate in a mobile browser. Use it if you have a small number of navigation options (e.g. brand store)
  • Homepage as navigation hub: If your site is task-oriented, you can use your homepage as main navigation hub. This works well if your users tend to stay in a single branch of the navigation hierarchy during a session (e.g. holiday travel site)

The content should be responsive and readable without making any further efforts. Try to keep a space between the content and the border of the mobile screen.

2. Landing Pages Optimized for Email

Email is most popular marketing tool, and a large number of people check their emails using their mobile devices. This is why many eCommerce owners create email marketing campaigns for the holiday sales season, which specifically target mobile users.

While you create a blueprint of the email for marketing, don’t forget to include a mobile-optimized and personalized landing page. It should contain a heading, CTA, relevant image and no clutter.

3. Help Customers Find Their Gifts

Buying gifts can be a daunting task for shoppers who have absolutely no idea what the recipient wants or needs.  With interactive gift finders, you can inspire these shoppers, present them with ideas, and help them find the best gift. You’ll also be able to significantly reduce their holiday stress and make it into their good books for future purchase decisions.

Whether they want to buy a gift for their better half, parents, siblings or friends, you can quickly taper down their gift choices and help them find a gift, which would be perfect for the recipient and the occasion. Give your customers the most memorable shopping experience during the busy holiday season by optimizing your mobile with a gift finder.

Sign up for a free zoovu trial, use their intelligent Digital Advice Suite, and create your very own gift finder for any occasion.

T-Mobile Gift Finder

4. Optimize the Mobile On-Site Search Experience

For holiday shoppers, who already have an idea of what they want to purchase, you need to make it easy to find the desired products.

Search is generally the preferred product finding strategy for these shoppers, as they find it being the most straight-forward and fastest, according to the Baymard Institute.

Offer search implementations that return relevant results, even if users misspell a word (fault-tolerance) or don’t use the exact same jargon as on your site (synonyms). With smart autocomplete suggestions, you can increase the discoverability rate and reduce shopper frustration.

And, should your shoppers inevitably end up at a “no results” page, keep them engaged and offer them a way out by making the result page more intelligent. Don’t display a generic page, but help the user along towards a new path based on their search context or browsing history.

Target’s mobile search

5. Avoid Pop-up Banners

If mobile shoppers are in the process of browsing your mobile site, any distraction which stops them from proceeding, can frustrate them and even make them leave your site then and there. Any distraction that can be avoided should be avoided, as it cuts offs the mobile shopper’s thought process. If you need to include a specific message, better integrate it at the top section within the mobile site.

Keep in mind that these mobile holiday shoppers are in hurry, especially if they have a time-restricted discount waiting for them.  So, to make their shopping experience as smooth as possible, avoid adding any banners or pop-ups. These pop-ups can kill your conversion rates and increase your abandonment rates.

6. Quick Checkout

During the holiday season, customers shop via their mobile phones, because they expect that it will not take much of their time.

You need to make the checkout process quick and easy with few clicks. Make sure that the form on the checkout page asks only information that is necessary to process the order for both customers and guests.

7. Control the Number of Images

Shoppers expect a mobile website to load faster, regardless of the devices on which it is viewed on. On a desktop website, you can have a large number of images, but as the screen size of the mobile devices is comparatively small, you need to make sure that the images are optimized and load quickly. Otherwise it can lead to an increase in drop-offs.

8. Help Option on Every Page

Together with the frequent use of technologies and smartphones, shoppers are getting more used to the mobile shopping environment. But, there can be times when they might need some help or assistance while browsing in your store. They expect the same service and support they can access on the desktop on their mobile phones.

In that case, make sure to add your helpline number or offer live chat support 24/7 during the holiday season, so your visitors can get their queries resolved while they are still on your website.

Conclusive Thoughts

The holiday season starts with the Thanksgiving Day, but offline, as well as online retailers, must have started preparing their stores for the sales season long before that. If you’re too late this year, make sure to bookmark this page and already start preparing for next year’s buzz.

With the increasing use of technology and everything getting so convenient and effortless, the expectations of shoppers are increasing for mobile sites too. To match or excel these expectations, you need to focus your efforts on optimizing not only the desktop site but also your mobile site or app. This will help you improve sales and revenue from mobile channels throughout the year – and most importantly, during the holiday season.

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