5 eCommerce mobile UX Mistakes you must Avoid

Almost 40% of eCommerce sales are done via mobile websites and apps. Naturally, it makes sense to focus on the basics of eCommerce Mobile UX to ensure your visitors return as happy customers.

Your eCommerce site is an extension of your brand, and how content the user is when interacting with it directly translates to how they perceive your brand. Case in point — People who have a negative experience on mobile are 62% less likely to make a future purchase, no matter how beautiful or data-driven your marketing campaigns are.

Unfortunately, while developers understand that user experience is important, many tend to focus on how their website looks rather than the psychology behind its design. However, the purpose of good mobile UX is not simply visual appeal but enabling the users to accomplish what they want seamlessly while interacting with your site.

So, even with compelling brand content and an aesthetically pleasing interface, simple eCommerce mobile UX mistakes might be costing you in sales and revenue.

In this blog, we’ll go over the five factors that contribute to eCommerce design failures, so you know exactly what to avoid.

1. Inadequate Navigation and Search Functionality

Navigation in an eCommerce mobile UX is more critical than the average user realizes. However, it is also more challenging to manage than desktop navigation because of the limited real estate available on smartphones. Moreover, the requirement is always to prioritize content.

A site with intuitive navigation allows users to go where they want to with the least friction possible. However, owing to clumsy UX flaws, not all website developers can manage this. So here are the often-overlooked navigation and search features you must employ in your mobile site:

1. Familiar Icons:

Have you ever noticed how the home or camera icon is virtually the same across all apps and websites? This is because users are accustomed to traditional icons. While it may seem creative to redesign your site icons, they’re going to make your user feel confused and frustrated when maneuvering in the site.

2. Optimize the Search Bar:

Make sure your search bar is visible and incorporate spelling fixes and autosuggestions into it to make it easier for your users to find a particular product. Moreover, ensure that no search query leads the user to an error page; even if the specific product they are looking for isn’t available. You can always direct them towards similar or discounted products.

3. Categorize Smartly:

A well-organized and adequately segmented site interface is essential to make your users feel comfortable when steering via mobile. In addition, proper product classification can make the first step of the buying process undemanding for your users, keeping them engaged on the site.

2. Designs Unoptimized for Fingers

Mobile devices accounted for 54.8% of global website traffic in the first quarter of 2021 and have consistently hovered around the 50% mark since the beginning of 2017. Unsurprisingly, having a website with good mobile UX is the need of the hour for eCommerce stores. However, while responsive web design has made it possible to construct sites that function equally well on all platforms, developers often fail to come up with finger-friendly optimization solutions for mobile devices.

A few things to consider when optimizing your mobile site for fingertips are:

1. Small Touch Targets:

Tiny targets make users work harder since they require more precision to be clicked with fingers.

2. Icons Grouped Together:

Users can easily initiate undesired actions by mistakenly pressing the neighboring symbol when using their fingers.

3. Not Optimized for Thumbs:

Mobile users employ their fingers as well as their thumbs to navigate. It is essential to consider that thumbs are wider than fingers and may require a different target size for smooth functioning.

3. The Checkout isn’t Optimized

More than 69% of online shoppers abandon their carts before completing the purchase. This is a telling figure — the checkout option is one of the most important aspects of your site design because it is the last destination for all visitors.

UX optimization aims to reduce friction from when a customer arrives on your page and when they click the "buy now" button. Each step is a new opportunity for the user to reevaluate their purchase and get rid of as many stumbling blocks as feasible.

Some of the things that can help with that are:

1. Guest Checkout:

Give your users the option to buy things without making an account on your site.

2. Save Information:

By letting your users save their shipping and billing information, you ensure that their next purchase with your website is even smoother.

3. Final Order Review:

In the end, the users should see exactly what products they added to their cart and their prices in an orderly manner.

4. Short Process:

Minimize the steps it takes for the user to buy the product to 3-5 steps only.

5. Show Progress:

Use a progress bar or other such tool to show your users where they are in the checkout process and the number of steps needed to complete it.

4. Bad Product Images

Since online shoppers cannot physically hold things to determine how they feel and seem, the burden of replicating and improving this component of the in-store experience falls on the eCommerce site.

How can it do that?

When deciding on a potential purchase, a staggering 75% of online shoppers rely on product photos. However, if these photos are designed for desktop sites and don’t translate well to mobile sites to give the users a complete overview of the product, they might abandon the purchase. Other things one must take into account when dealing with photos for mobile sites are:

A. Resolution: Add high-resolution images that do not pixelate when zoomed in on

B. Relevance: Avoid visual clutter by including images relevant to the product

C. Distortion: Always display images at their appropriate aspect ratio

5. Slow Load Time

We live in a world where consumers expect the very best to arrive as quickly as possible.

Speed is essential; if your site is wonderfully designed but never loads, no one will ever see it. Forget about buying from it. As the page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of the visitor bouncing from your site increases by 32%, growing exponentially with each second — 123% at 10 seconds!

Evidently, the performance of each page load is critical. If your mobile site is not fast and lightweight, customers will perceive every page interaction as sluggish. And for potential clients, poor site performance is a deal-breaker.

Ready to optimize your eCommerce Mobile UX?

Consumer preferences are shifting, and it’s no longer enough for a company to offer exceptional products or services; it’s now increasingly necessary to have a user-friendly online presence. This is especially true when you consider that UX developers spend 50% of their time fixing issues that could have been avoided. Fortunately, you can now steer clear of these common UX errors and ensure that your brand has a comprehensive and well-designed mobile site in its armory to compete in the competitive e-commerce sector.

Over the last 10 years, we have delivered hundreds of projects for US and Indian companies across various sectors - Financial & Banking, Hospitality, Logistics, Healthcare, Social Media, and Enterprise Software.