Five tips for a successful mobile store

MOBILE STORE More and more people are shopping on mobile devices. For business owners, it’s crucial to offer users a convenient and simple mobile shopping experience. After all, if the purchase falls through due to issues like slow mobile page load times, the customer is quickly lost. The following tips come from mobile commerce experts at Trusted Shops.1. long texts only in excerptsWhat has always been true on the web is even more important for mobile-optimized stores: getting to the point. Mobile online shoppers in particular want their questions about products answered quickly and don't want to have to read or scroll through miles of text on their smartphone. If longer texts are necessary - such as for content details or appetite stimulators for books - the entire text should only be displayed after interaction with the visitor (e.g. after a click). For example: The online bookseller Thalia currently solves this nicely in its mobile online store.2. offer a link to the desktop versionNo matter how good the standalone mobile online store is, there are always users who are looking for that one piece of information that is not displayed on the mobile product page. You should also think about users who cannot find their way around the standalone mobile version of the store because a different categorization is offered on mobile than in the normal store. These users should be offered a great deal of freedom of choice with a link to the "normal" desktop version of your online store. A link to the desktop version - for example at the end of the website - is therefore ideal.3. help with filling out formsAn online store cannot normally do without forms. Whether newsletter registration, order process, user registration or search: forms can be found in many places in online stores. Store operators already know from the desktop world: bad forms are conversion killers. This applies all the more to shopping on a smartphone or tablet. The likelihood of abandonment should therefore be reduced. Only the absolutely necessary information is requested and the possibilities of the software keyboards on smartphones should definitely be used. With HTML5, the smartphone can easily be made to display the email address keyboard layout when, for example, the customer's email address is requested. In the same way, the numeric keypad can be displayed directly when, for example, a telephone number or house number is requested.4. optimize loading timesCustomers have little patience, especially on mobile devices. A fast loading time is therefore the be-all and end-all. Both responsive online stores and stand-alone mobile stores often still have potential for optimization. Style sheets and JavaScript files should therefore be minified and a compression tool used to reduce the file size of images without any visible loss of quality. A test with the start page of randomly selected online stores revealed potential savings of between 55 and 70 percent.5. insert home screen iconsOnline stores always live from regular customers. To ensure that they find their way directly to the online store, many passionate online shoppers place the store they trust on their home screen. online store icons for the home screen should therefore be integrated. iOS, Android and Windows Mobile all make it possible to save websites as favorites on the home screen. HTML code can be generated in just a few minutes using simple online generators.