Mobile Shoppers Don’t Give Your Site a Second Chance

By Rieva Lesonsky

This past holiday season proved that mobile shopping is here to stay. And a recent Limelight Networks survey of smartphone and/or tablet owners showed that consumers have high expectations when researching and buying products online. A whopping 80 percent of respondents said they will abandon a mobile site if the shopping experience isn’t up to par.

Three-fourths of these customers say they won’t give up on the company altogether—they’ll just visit the site later on a desktop computer. But one-fourth will give up on the company and visit different sites so they can complete their research or purchase. What’s more, 20 percent of consumers said they wouldn’t return in the future to a site that gave them problems on a mobile device.

So what do consumers expect from the mobile research or shopping experience? Here were the top 3 features as defined by respondents:

• 88 percent said the time it takes for the site to load is extremely important or important
• 88 percent said detailed product images on the site (such as being able to “zoom in” on product details) are extremely important or important
• 82 percent said mobile site optimization, or how well the site fits the screen, as extremely important or important

The number of consumers shopping on a mobile device is only going to grow. Already 67.4 percent of those surveyed have used their device to shop online; 83 percent have researched and purchased a product on a mobile device; and 17 percent have just researched.

What does this mean to your business? Increasingly, consumers aren’t drawing a distinction between the mobile Web and the Web. They expect the same level of accessibility, detail and convenience whether they’re shopping from their phone or on their desktop computer. So if you’re still making excuses for why your website is subpar on a mobile device, you’d better stop—because your customers aren’t making excuses for you. They’re moving on to your competition.

Image by Flickr user Ron Bennetts (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Marketing, sales process, Small Business, small business, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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