Optimise Your E-Commerce Website for Mobile Devices

There are lots of E-Commerce websites floating around on the World Wide Web. Businesses have realised that they can take advantage of the Internet to sell more products to their consumers, and potentially get a lot more new clients. However, not a lot of E-Commerce websites had mobile devices in mind when the websites were being built. When you view the website on a desktop’s browser, the website looks absolutely fine, but when you try to view it in on a mobile device it either shrinks very small to the point where you can’t read anything and have to zoom in, or the layout of the website takes a turn for the worse and it seems like you’re viewing someone playing a bad game of Tetris.

So here are a few things to keep in mind while building your eCommerce website:

Responsiveness is the name of the game.

Responsive design is vital to your website. People need to be able to view your website on any device, mobile or desktop, without compromising the shopper’s experience. A good web developer should be able to convert your E-Commerce website to a one-fits-all website fairly easily. There are many frameworks like Bootstrap to help you out, but CSS is your best friend; you can set multiple break points and have different styles for different devices.

The simplicity of the content.

On a mobile device you don’t want to have your website cluttered with content - you want the shopper to see the important information, like your products. You need to display your products in such a way that the shopper can clearly see what the product is and how much it costs. Use big images and a font that reads clearly. Also try to prevent multiple levels of navigation; shoppers don’t want to click multiple times just to see the full details of a certain product. Keep in mind that people have a short attention span when it comes to browsing a website, so keep them enticed before they scatter away to other websites and buy from your competitors.

To the sub-domain we go.

If you’re not too familiar with responsive design there are 2 things you might want to consider. One, either give up as a web developer or start pulling up your socks and embark on your journey to mastering responsive design. Two, you can develop a separate mobile version of your website and host it on a sub-domain i.e. m.ecommerce.com. This way you can filter out the non-essential content and keep it simple and straight to the point. With just a few lines of JavaScript you can check what device the user is using to view your website and then redirect them if need be. You can also call upon the help of PHP, or .htaccess to help you to redirect users.

If you want your E-Commerce website to succeed, you’ll need to focus on the different technologies out there and start planning on how you can use them to your advantage to greatly improve your online presence and keep the virtual shoppers happy!