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| Posted on January 18, 2013 by Usableblog |
Five Effective Ways to Make Mobile Holiday Shopping Easier
By Chris Werely. This past holiday season, I made a commitment to buy all of my Christmas gifts on mobile (iPhone and iPad). I set out to do it with a learning perspective, but also found great convenience and engaging experiences. I’d like to share a few of my favorite and most effective elements of a great mobile experience so they can be incorporated into your mobile roadmap for 2013. 1. Free Shipping banners on every page. I tried to shop only on sites that offered free shipping. It was common to find a banner ad or text on the homepage promoting this offer, but if I never saw it, or I entered directly into a product page from a Google search, it was easy to miss the offer – which meant I would not complete a purchase. Desktop sites, taking advantage of more screen real estate, more commonly display this offer throughout the site. Mobile sites should keep shipping promotions prominent. 2. Great Product Pages. Give me lots of images and make them big, but please don’t make me refresh the page to toggle between them! When buying a product like a pair of khaki pants, I had the best experience when I could select color and size without needing to refresh the page. 3. Easy Filtering. One of the biggest purchases I made this year was a pair of earrings for my wife. I was looking for something very specific, which required filtering through thousands of options (style, color, metal, carat, price etc.). The best mobile sites allowed me to filter quickly, minimize page refreshes, always tracked filter options I had already selected, and allowed me to edit my filters easily. In the end, I did most of my discovery and research on my phone, but made the final purchase on my iPad. 4. Predictive Search. Entering search keywords and sorting through long lists of results on an iPhone can be time-consuming. Predictive search simplified the process and kept me from losing interest while browsing. PetSmart’s mobile site with predictive search made shopping for pet toys a delight! 5. One-Click Purchase. This is undoubtedly the easiest and fastest way to get holiday shopping done! Amazon led the way with one-click checkout and quickly become one of my preferred shopping sites. I also liked ShopNBC’s QuickPay version of one-click purchase. Watch for this functionality to become even more popular in 2013. Here is where I did my mobile shopping:
Shopping on mobile was easy and I will definitely do more of it. I hope my experience and this list is useful as you develop a strategy for your next generation mobile site. Leave a Reply |
