If you are reading this on your phone, you are not alone!
If you aren’t, is your phone nearby…in your pocket, on your desk? Mobile devices have become an ingrained part of our everyday life and have found their way into just about every activity of the day. This means many parts of and even the complete pathway to purchase is being executed on mobile devices. The topic of mobile is so hot right now, every vertical of the retail industry is buzzing about it!
Did you see the January/February issue of Sleep Savvy?
They published a short article titled, Going Mobile. The page 38 article focused on an interview with James E. Dion, president of Dionco Inc, a Chicago-based retail consulting firm. The article stresses the changes the mobile revolution has brought about do not compare to anything the retail industry has ever experienced before.
The prospects you want are shopping with their smart phones. According to the 2013 Google/Nielsen study, once a consumer initiates a mobile search, 55% of conversions happen within an hour! Whether that conversion is a store visit, a phone call or a purchase — it is happening and it is happening fast. 83% of consumers want to complete their purchase on the same day they initiated the search. Have you figured out how to capitalize on consumers that are using their mobile devices to shop?
If your answer is “no”, then we should talk. We research, design and iterate on the best mobile experiences with retailers like you because we know how critical it is.
Let’s talk mobile site design for a second…
Mobile sites are typically built one of two possible ways. Responsive designs automatically resize and rearrange the same content being displayed on your full site depending on the size of the viewing screen. Alternate designs use a different set of files to display product information and images in a way that is optimized for the mobile device being used. This means a seamless online shopping experience for the user that includes quick to load text and images, easy navigation and large buttons, on site navigation/driving directions and one touch calling to the store.
Confused a little? Hopefully we can clear that up quickly…the website you are reading this post on is responsive. Same information, same files, just resized to fit the screen or window of the device you are using. But to allow for true mobile optimization for our RWS clients’ websites, we made the careful decision to follow the example of the largest international online retailer, Amazon, and use an alternate mobile design; other retail giants like, Home Depot and Lowes, chose alternative mobile sites too. And like we discussed, alternate design allows for many features that make the user experience easy to connect with you in your store; such as — larger buttons for easy one touch calling, GPS selection of the nearest store location, and mobile navigation integrated with the operating system’s native navigation app. This type of easy accessibility for the end consumer should allow you to win your share of the conversions happening in that first hour after a mobile search is completed! Now doesn’t this make perfect sense?
As we see more and more statistics indicating that mobile isn’t a phase and won’t be going away anytime soon, we are left with one question. Why would you trust your mobile presence to anyone else but the experts in independent retailer websites? Building websites that include an optimized mobile site for independent retailers is what we do at Retailer Web Services, and we do it better than anyone else!