3 top priorities for optimizing mobile checkout
In previous posts, we’ve surveyed top eCommerce web sites to gauge how merchants are optimizing the shopping cart and checkout to maximize sales. But as the latest MarketLive Performance Index revealed, the desktop experience is only part of the overall shopping picture: mobile devices now account for more than a third of all traffic to merchant sites and bring in nearly 20% of online revenues.
In last week’s blog post, we revealed how a deeper dive into those numbers exposed a lost opportunity: smartphone shopping. With 22% of traffic generating just 6% of total online revenues, it’s clear that merchants must do more to win sales on the small screen.
The Performance Index numbers confirmed our findings from the survey of mobile purchase experiences we undertook for our new whitepaper, which details path-to-purchase practices for 100 top sites on both desktop and smartphones. We found that in general, mobile purchasing is reminiscent of online shopping circa 2000 – basic, sometimes un-intuitive functionality often lacking crucial supporting content or creative offers. And on the extreme end, 13% of the sites we surveyed didn’t even offer a mobile-optimized version, while the purchase process on a few of the allegedly optimized sites was longer and more complicated than on the desktop/laptop browser version!
While the mobile add-to-cart and shopping cart steps had their own highs and lows, the most glaring deficiencies came in checkout. For starts, our tally revealed that close to 40% of mobile-optimized sites required at least five pages to complete checkout, compared with just 16% of desktop sites – a counter-intuitive finding, since we assumed that merchants would streamline the process to the utmost for small screens with finicky touch keypads.
We hoped that the higher number of steps was merely due to a desire to limit the amount of scrolling mobile shoppers had to undertake. Unfortunately, that was not the case; rather, the high number of steps was due to clunky implementations that in some cases require more typed input than on the desktop sites.
To improve the mobile checkout experience, merchants should:
Provide guest checkout. We can’t say it enough: forcing shoppers to set up usernames and passwords in order to complete purchases is an unwise move — especially on mobile sites, where streamlining is the name of the game. So we were surprised that a higher percentage of mobile sites (11%) than desktop sites (8%) required registration to complete purchases. Even more surprisingly, the discrepancy was partly due to instances where account creation was required on a brand’s mobile site, but not its desktop site – a jaw-dropping finding which made us wonder whether the eCommerce executives in charge had ever actually tried purchasing on their own mobile sites.
Instead, most mobile sites would do well to skip the “login vs. guest checkout” step altogether or relegate it to a secondary position, as MarketLive merchant Helzberg Diamonds does in its three-step mobile checkout process. A link labeled “Sign In” at the top right gives registered users access to their saved information, while the majority of shoppers proceed directly to entering billing information, including the email address on the first screen.
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