Best Practice Mobile Checkout Design Tips

It’s commonly accepted that mobile commerce is the fast-approaching future. Any ecommerce business that isn’t mobile optimised runs the risk of getting left behind.

We’ve seen mobile traffic increase by up to 500% in the last year yet many mobile sites that we’ve looked at have had woeful conversion rates compared to their site average.

To an extent, mobile is still a browsing tool and computers are for making purchases. From what we've seen, however, there are still plenty of things that could be hindering mobile conversion rates.

We've reviewed the top 20 most visited sites in the UK and looked at the best practice trends that will shape the future of mobile checkouts.

Here are our top tops:

KISS

Keep It Short Stupid – If you want users to buy from their mobile you’re going to have to cut out the extraneous pages. Many of these sites had five page checkouts (eg. Currys & Asda). Having more pages means annoying more customers.

Breadcrumbs

Make sure you have a clear breadcrumb or progress bar in your checkout – Many of these big sites don’t tell the user how far they are through the checkout. This is crucial because mobile navigation is generally slower, less intuitive and more frustrating than on normal web browsers.

Asda has a clear breadcrumb, but it doesn’t show all the steps in one go. Still, it’s enough to lead you through the process. Currys has a five page checkout but has a clear breadcrumb, so at least users know where they are going.

Registration & Login

Registration can be a good thing (as well as a very bad thing) – When it’s dealt with properly it allows regular shoppers to bypass much of the checkout. The common approach is to provide the login fields followed by a button to bypass login and purchase as a guest. Don't make first time purchasers wade through these

New Look, however, have a small section at the top which reads “For faster checkout [sign in]” and then offers the new customer a normal checkout. (see image). Currys, however, only offers an option to “Sign In  or Register”; something that will put many users off.

Correct Keyboards

Give users the right keyboards for the right forms. Asda gets it right by offering a phone keypad when entering your phone number. But then they don’t give you a ‘@’ symbol when you’re entering your email.

Look out for our full review of the state of mobile ecommerce next week for more tips on giving your users the best possible mobile experience. 

If you want to ensure you get the most out of your ecommerce platform, give MoneySpyder a call on 0207 492 1929 or email info@moneyspyder.co.uk.

MoneySpyder are Google Analytics Consultants and ecommerce experts.