Mobile is big news, and it’s only getting bigger. More than half of all adults in the UK are in possession of their very own smartphone – and 13% more people used their phone to browse online last year than the last.

Is your shop primed to take advantage of the millions on mobile? With a little eCommerce website development, it’s easy to ensure that your online shop looks great to the millions of people using Android, Apple and Windows phones. Here are 5 top tips:

1. Don’t Limit Your Stock

Research shows that mobile devices are frequently used during the research process. Users flit from shop to shop on their mobile and take particular inspiration from visual social media accounts like Pinterest and Instagram before taking the plunge and buying online.

Therefore, it’s essential that your mobile site carries just as many individual products as your regular site does – or you could lose out on a hefty percentage of visitors.

2. Offer Responsive Design

It may sound pretty hi-tech, but the concept of responsive design is alarmingly simple. In short, it’s a website design that automatically adjusts depending on the device that’s being used to access the internet.

Responsive design isn’t just good for improving your customer’s online experience, it’s also becoming increasingly important for SEO – Google has already said that it prefers responsive sites in mobile search results. There are some fantastic examples of responsive design, Skinny Ties Website looks fresh and sleek both on desktop and mobile, not to mention tablet.

Mobile Version

Desktop Version

Ensuring your website is responsive isn’t hard to do either – there are many web design programs such as Magento and Shopify which offer responsive design as standard. In the 21st century there’s no excuse for your site not to be instantly usable by mobile.

3. Fast Loading for SEO

Speaking of Google, it’s essential to get your mobile site as SEO-friendly as possible. And a rapid site speed is part and parcel of that. Google has always given preferential treatment to web pages that offered a better, faster online experience. And for mobile-friendly sites, it’s more important than ever.

Recent Google updates mean that if your mobile site takes longer than 1 second to load then it could get discriminated against in the search engines, so it could make sense to give your pages some decent content above the fold.

Google Software Engineer Bryan McQuade explained more in a blog post:

Research shows that users’flow is interrupted if pages take longer than one second to load. To deliver the best experience and keep the visitor engaged, our guidelines focus on rendering some content, known as the above-the-fold content, to users in one second (or less) while the rest of the page continues to load and render in the background.

4. Social Logins

Studies have shown that mobile users don’t really like using keyboards. After all, they’re small, tricky and can be slow to use. So you need to make sure that it’s as easy as possible for your users to navigate your site without having to waste time typing.

For instance, instead of requesting for customers to fill in personal information while registering, why not introduce social logins so that they can give you their details using Facebook or Twitter.

Bitly.com does this really well, as soon as you land on the login page you can see the two boxes, login with Twitter and Facebook saving the user time if they sign up. Likewise, you could add PayPal buttons to make it easier and more convenient to pay and stop customers getting dissuaded at the checkout stage.

5. Offer Alternatives to Mobile Payment

A recent YouGov survey found that of 80% of people who don’t buy using their mobile do so because of security concerns. Therefore, it makes sense to offer alternatives to mobile purchasing. Could you offer a reserve and collect function? Is there even the potential for cash payment on delivery? Do you make it easy for customers to add to their ‘wish list’.

Flexibility is key. The more options you offer customers, the more chance you’re reaching them on their level – and the more likely you’ll be to make those precious sales.