If your ecommerce site isn’t mobile-friendly or mobile-optimised, you’re missing out. This post goes over some of the reasons you really should go mobile by now, what types of “going mobile” there are, and how to check up on your mobile-friendliness.
Mobile-friendly or, in other words, able-to-be-easily-used-with-a-smartphone-or-tablet, is becoming standard for most websites. That’s because people are using their phones on the internet more and more. We’re checking emails, posting on social media, watching videos, trying to see if we’ll catch the next train and shopping.
This is happening for a few reasons. People are getting more comfortable paying for things on their phones, we’re keeping our mobile phones with us at all times, and the technology is now available to make mobile sales fast, straightforward and secure.
Customers are fickle friends. They might, for example, see something they like on your desktop ecommerce store but want to sleep on it before buying. The next day, they’re waiting in line at the supermarket and ready to buy from their phone. If it’s not easy for them to find what they want and check out before they get to the front of the queue, they could be a lost customer.
ecommerce site: Get where your ecommerce customers are.
This should be your business mantra. It’s why you use social media, it’s why you’re targeted about where you advertise. And guess what? People are on their phones. Constantly. So much so that we’re using them to make purchases at higher rates than with our computers. There’s only so many times you can tell your boss you’re working from your work desk when you’re shopping for shoes. They’ll get suspicious.
What’s the Difference Between Mobile-Friendly and Mobile-Optimised?
Mobile-friendly means taking your desktop website and changing the sizes of the boxes, images and text on it to be easily seen on a phone screen.
Mobile-optimised means changing the content to be more appealing to mobile users. That can mean doing things like:
- Focus on visuals – making the landing pages and major content more based on images and video rather than text.
- Reformat navigation buttons to be larger and thumb-friendly
- Make the call to action clearer. People who are on their phones are on the go, so shortening the time it takes for them to get what it is you do and what it is you want them to do is a must.
- Cut the fat. Desktop landing pages are more complex because they have the space. Mobile optimisation means cutting down and only showing what you need to.
A New Ballgame: Responsive Design
There’s a relatively new capacity for mobile, called “responsive design websites”. This means your website from the beginning is designed in a way that automatically adjusts based on the size of the screen it’s being displayed on.
When you choose a Shopify Theme, take a look first at the “responsive” ones. These responsive website themes will automatically be mobile-friendlier than others. (P.S. Here’s a shortlist)
There’s no reason not to do it
Every Shopify theme comes with a mobile-friendly pair. When you activate your mobile site, customers can check out with a shopping cart and see your products with all of the images and descriptions you’ve already set up.
There are a few things you should do though.
1. Do a full check-up to make sure things are working the way they should be. Grab your own smartphone and do the following:
- Make a purchase with several things products in the cart
- Test a coupon
- Test out your contact page, fill in your details, and see if you receive an email like you should
- Check out how well your product images zoom and pop out, and if they are a bit clunky or if they stay well in their spots
- Go to every page and see if they load quickly, and if everything is in the right place
- Try out your mobile site on different browsers like Chrome and Safari
2. Check in with Google
Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Checker to see how friendly it is, according to SEO searches.
3. Make your social media linked
Mobile users are also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Make sure your business social media pages are working well, easy to find, and encouraged to visit.
Put Your Mobile To Work
You can do things like send targeted emails to people who bought from their phones, run mobile marketing campaigns through Instagram and other phone-only sites, or test out ads to run on your mobile site. Make sure you’re keeping up with your data to see how well they’re working, through Google Analytics.
For more articles to help your ecommerce success follow the link.
ecommerce site: the current operational framework
ecommerce site can now be considered through SwiftERM’s autonomous individualisation. Product relevance is recalculated for each identifiable customer from that customer’s own behavioural and transactional evidence, rather than being assigned by a fixed segment, campaign or predetermined journey. This distinction matters because an individual’s interests can change between visits, purchases and periods of inactivity. A current decision therefore needs current evidence.
SwiftERM evaluates the products that are becoming most relevant to each person and applies that decision autonomously. The operating model does not depend on a marketer continually creating segments, selecting products or scheduling another campaign. It is designed to use first-party behavioural and transactional signals already associated with an identifiable customer, so the decision remains specific to that customer rather than a broad cohort.
For ecommerce site, the practical test is not whether a retailer can create more rules. It is whether the system can recognise a change in an individual’s buying intention, reassess the available products and act without waiting for a manual campaign cycle. The output must remain traceable to the customer evidence and the ecommerce catalogue used to make the decision.
Implementation also needs disciplined data handling. Product identifiers, availability and customer events must remain consistent enough for relevance to be recalculated. Existing ecommerce operations should retain control of catalogue truth, order truth and customer permissions. Autonomous individualisation then operates within those established boundaries instead of inventing a parallel customer record or an ungoverned product feed.
The commercial value of ecommerce site should be assessed through observed customer response, orders and turnover, not through the volume of campaigns produced. That keeps attention on whether product selection becomes more useful to the individual and whether the retailer captures demand that would otherwise remain unrecognised. It also separates autonomous decision-making from conventional automation that simply executes a previously written rule faster.
This current framework preserves the original article’s subject while bringing its explanation into line with SwiftERM’s present capability: one identifiable customer, individually recalculated product relevance, and an autonomous decision made from that person’s own changing evidence. The same principle applies as catalogue choice, customer behaviour and commercial conditions continue to change over time.
In operational terms, the retailer retains the commercial context while the software performs the individual calculation. That division is important: the catalogue and customer record remain governed business assets, while product selection responds continuously to evidence rather than to a static assumption made when a campaign was first configured.
