3 Mobile E-commerce Tips for the Holiday Season

Andy Beohar

This holiday season, as more and more shoppers are using their smartphones to research and purchase products, e-commerce sites must shift their focus to mobile. Your company may already have a mobile site, but it isn’t enough to just have one—you need to make sure it’s optimized for this new age of shoppers.

But where do you start? Below, we’ve shared 3 tips for ensuring your mobile e-commerce site is in great shape this holiday season:

Is your mobile site using best design practices?

Google has come up with a great way of letting you know whether your site is optimized for mobile with the launch of its “mobile-friendly” label, which it attaches to applicable websites in its mobile search results. This label is a clear sign to consumers that a site will allow them to browse and purchase products easily from their phones, and will give yours an edge over non-mobile-compatible sites. Test your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool, and make sure it incorporates these best practices:

• Responsive design: This ensures your site automatically adapts to any device.
  
• Mobile-friendly link spacing: Space out links to accommodate the touch of a finger.
  
• Mobile-friendly font size: Make text visible to readers without them having to increase its size.

Have you optimized your site for search engines? 

A mobile shopper is generally more inclined to act on purchasing the product they’re researching or sourcing compared to a desktop searcher, and is less likely to look past the first page of search results. Fortunately, along with its mobile-friendly label, Google released a ranking algorithm designed to favor such web pages, but first your site must be free of the following:

• Slow loading pages
  
• Faulty redirects
  
• Blocked JavaScript, CSS, and image files
  
• Unplayable content

For more information on what Google considers an optimized mobile site when assessing for rank, read their Mobile-Friendly Websites guide.

Are you extending the reach of your brand using mobile ads? 

eMarketer estimates that the mobile advertising industry will break $ 100 billion by next year, meaning that many marketers are taking advantage of increased smartphone usage to extend the reach of their advertising, and you should too.

Create ads through social media sites to be found where mobile users are most active, to remarket to previous site visitors, and to better reach ideal customers with geo-location and ad targeting tools, and consider these tips for writing compelling ad copy:

• Offer shopper incentives, such as free shipping or coupons
  
• Grab your users attention with your headline, and make them aware of your offer
  
• Use keywords your audience searches for within your ads to better target your ideal customer

Incorporate these 3 tips for e-commerce sites to ensure that you’re making the most of your mobile efforts this holiday season.

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