Responsive e-commerce site

A responsive e-commerce site is a must for every company that wishes to attract customers. Currently, most younger clients use mobile technologies to communicate, entertain and make shopping, hence the mobile version of the online shop is necessary for any good results of the sale. Read the article to find out more about responsive e-commerce sites.

Responsive e-commerce site – table of contents:

1. Responsive e-commerce site
2. Mobile-first trend
3. The mobile first rule
4. Mobile first rule and SEO
5. What is the mobile gap?
6. Mobile traffic and monetization
7. Summary

Responsive e-commerce site

The statistics show a clear picture. Mobile internet traffic and the time spent on mobile devices are much higher than those parameters measured for desktop computers. The conversion rates are higher on stationary devices is the highest. The connections between mobile traffic and conversion on stationary devices are complex, but specialists are sure that mobile access to the offer has a growing impact on sales.

Currently, there are more than 2,5 billion mobile smart devices in the world, and all of them download 17 exabytes of data each month. Internet is more mobile than before and the data leave no doubt about it. The expansion of the mobile channel is determined by the changes in the shopping behavior of clients.

Accordingly to Insider Intelligence, the estimated value of e-commerce trade may reach 620,97 billion dollars, and that includes the earnings of e-commerce estimated at 42,9 %. Even though those numbers are hard to be overlooked, some companies don’t follow the trend and reluctantly move towards mobile trade, not all companies have mobile versions of their online stores.

Mobile-first trend

Eric Schmidt, who once was the CEO of Google, stated in 2010 that designers should respect the mobile-first principle which means that they should design their websites with mobile devices in mind and later adjust their functions to stationary computers.

It means that web designers should pay attention to the whole experience of the user, who uses mobile devices, instead of concentrating on changing the screen sizes only. Many companies take the opposite direction, they act in the spirit of Responsive Web Design (RWD) and force their stationary website, with the CSS tags, to customize to the smaller screens.

This approach seems to be insufficient. A bigger size of the screen means a better ability to display the content, that is not equally visible on smaller, mobile devices.

The website designers who make their projects for desktop computers have more abilities, the interface is different, the images can have very high resolution, while the navigation uses the mouse pointer. Such functions are not available on mobile devices, they use a lot of transfer memory and are inconvenient for users.

The designers, who make their project, while remembering about internet bandwidth and sizes of screens aim to create attractive and fully-functional websites, that can be accessed on many types of platforms. This saves a lot of money and time.

The mobile first rule

The mobile-first rule should be the natural choice dictated by customs and expectations of the users and by objective factors such as cost-effectiveness and time consumption. This is not all, because in recent times the approach is not only recommended but almost required by Google.

The giant cannot just ignore half of the traffic, which is generated by mobile users, to keep users, please. Even though there is no serious competition in the browser market, Amazon has managed to take over a large part of the shopping intentions, which means that Google may see the risk and will not wish to give away that part of the market without a fight.

Mobile first rule and SEO

In 2015 Google has already announced the plan for algorithm updates, that will reward the search results that are displayed in a friendly way for mobiles. The update was called the Mobilegeddon by the SEO community and caused a buzz in the industry, but the real impact of the change was smaller than expected.

Mobile-first index was another action of Google. The giant has announced that mobile content will be used to index all websites and will be used to rank the results. As we see, the future is mobile. In the countries where the traditional IT infrastructure has not developed mobile transfer dominates the market in the forms of e-commerce and mobile store versions.

What is the mobile gap?

The so-called mobile gap causes sleepless nights among e-store owners. What does it mean exactly? The companies who don’t have the mobile versions of their stores lose many abilities to earn and sell. When clients have to switch from their mobile device to a stationary device to finalize the purchase transaction frequently change their minds, abandon the idea completely or postpone shopping to an even more distant future.

Mobile traffic and monetization

How to decrease the mobile gap and monetize the traffic generated by mobile devices? Frequently the increase in conversion may be seen even after the small changes on the website. Options that allow purchasing without the registration, shorter forms, autocompletion of fields, payment adjusted to mobile devices (such as Google Pay or Apple Pay) usually have a visible impact on conversion.

The performance of the website and the page loading speed have the immense significance recently. The mobile version of the online store should load within seconds otherwise impatient clients will abandon the website with no regrets.

Summary

In the article, we have discussed the responsiveness of e-commerce websites. The sellers, who wish to increase their market have to adapt to the changing needs of their customers. They have to acknowledge the fact that more and more clients purchase using mobile devices: smartphones or tablets.

Read also: What is e-commerce and who are online shoppers?

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