Last updated - February 24, 2020
As you may know, lot of customers are using mobile phones to shop. This means you need to ensure a great user experience for these customers too. If you are looking for some tips to improve the overall customer experience on your WooCommerce store, you can find it here. With advanced technologies and great devices, a lot of customers are finding it much easier to use mobile phones for online shopping. However, this is in fact a big challenge as well to store owners. Studies have pointed out that the chance of customers simply leaving the site, if the experience is not good the first time on mobile. In fact, this will be counter productive for your brand identity. In this article, we will look at some of the strategies you can adopt to optimize WooCommerce Customer Experience for Mobile users.
Optimize mobile experience based on context
You need to be well informed about your target audience before optimizing the experience for them. If you have a clear idea on the customer base that uses your site on your mobile, you can design an experience accordingly. Understand the proficiency of your customer base with the mobile experience, and improvise from there. For example, your approach might be different for experts compared to beginner level audience. In fact, this will help you to optimize the user interface in a more specific manner.
Go further than choosing a responsive WordPress theme
Choosing a responsive WordPress theme would be one of the primary steps that you would take to enable a smooth mobile experience to your customers. Basically, a responsive design would ensure that the site would adjust the content display according to the user’s screen size. However, if you dig deeper, you will find quite a lot more strategies that will help you with the cause of customer experience for mobile users. Let’s quickly look at some of the design aspects first. In the meanwhile, you can take a look at some of the top responsive WordPress themes that you can use on your site.
Optimize your homepage for mobile
The homepage is where the customer starts to interact with you. When you design a homepage for your store, you need to consider the experience of your mobile users as well. Stuffing your homepage with information is never a good strategy. That means you should be able to separate essential information from those that is not really necessary. The layout should be simple and the page should help the users to start with the shopping. Your customers should be able to locate the mobile menu and navigate to the pages they want to see. In addition, if you want to draw attention to any specific deals or offers, that can be done on the homepage.
Make the navigation simpler
You need to make your category and product structure as simple as possible. Your users should be able to easily make out the navigation of your store. For example, when they click on the mobile menu, the available category and product options should open up. And if there are multiple products nested under a category, it should be visible. And if a users wants to use the Search option, there should be a functional option available for that with as much detailing. To improve the search option, you can choose an efficient tool like the one discussed below:
WooCommerce Product Search
Product search is one of the most important factors for a seamless mobile experience. This extension helps your customers to search more easily on your store and find products they are looking for. The Live Search option provides results while the customer is typing, and provides pricing details, images, etc. In fact this reduces a lot of burden from customers to choose a product they are looking for when you have a lot of similar products. It has a very fast filter option, which updates quickly as the customer tries to filter the search results using the available choices. An interesting aspect here is that this extension makes use of search weights that improves the relevance of searches. Basically, the most appropriate result will be shown to the customer based on the typed keyword.
With the help of this extension, you will also be able to gain actionable insights based on what your customers are searching for. The single site subscription of this extension is priced at $49. You will find 5-site and 25-site subscriptions and $99 and $149 respectively.
Create a seamless checkout flow
Checkout flow is an important aspect that can impact the conversion rate on your store. You might find some good tips to improve your WooCommerce conversion rate here. Any delay in the checkout flow can really make the customer experience bad, and you might lose potential sales due to this. It is important to make sure that the customers are asked to fill out only necessary details during checkout. Your average mobile customer would be expecting a faster checkout compared to the desktop experience. We will discuss a useful solution that will help with your mobile checkout.
Flux Checkout
This mobile checkout plugin would ensure a great checkout experience for your mobile customers. It makes the checkout very easy by letting customers fill out only the relevant fields. During checkout only minimum fields are used, and customers are able to visually identify the checkout stage which they are on. This has a positive impact on conversions, as customers would be quite sure about the length of the checkout.
A major functionality this plugin would add to the checkout flow is the Address Autocoplete option. As your customers start typing an address, the plugin would prompt an address, which they can select and proceed. This is a really handy option as typically entering the address would take the longest in an online checkout flow.
Flux Checkout also offers different animations and modals to make the customer experience more pleasant. If you are planning on offering an exclusive experience to your mobile customers, this plugin can contribute a lot to that. The single site license of this plugin is available for $49. The 5-site license is $129 and a 20-site license would cost you $249.
WooCommerce One Page Checkout
The plugin discussed above is a great option if you are talking about a multi-page checkout. However, if you are focusing on a single page checkout, this WooCommerce extension might prove very useful to you. It allows your customers to select products to purchase and then checkout from the same page. You can keep the single page checkout option just for one product on your store, or for multiple featured products. It is a great option that will help you create custom landing pages, when you have events or special offers on your store. The plugin also help you to create custom templates to display, along with a few built-in options.
The single site license of this plugin would cost you $79. The 5-site license would be $129, and the 25-site license would be $179.
WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor
If you are looking to remove the default checkout fields on your store for a smoother mobile experience, you can try this one too. You can also add custom fields to your checkout page to make a very optimized checkout flow for your customers. The subscription options for this extension starts from $49.
Payment options
The payment options that you offer on your checkout page too can make a conversion rate. Your mobile customers might have different preferences compared to desktop users, when it comes to the choice of payment processors. It would be a great idea to make full use of analytics to gain insights in this regard. Amazon Pay might be a great option that you can try out to ensure great customer experience.
Amazon Payments Gateway for WooCommerce
Allowing customers to checkout using their Amazon accounts would do a world of good for the user experience on your store. This plugin from XAdapter would help you provide an option for your customers to use Amazon payment information to checkout. The order information will be passed on to Amazon payments and you will be covered by its fraud protection as well. This plugin may prove to be quite helpful to make sure you have new as well as repeat customers on your store. It also offers customizable recurring payments option, which increases customer loyalty on your store. If you are looking for a solution to set up subscriptions and recurring payments on your store, this article can help.
WooCommerce Social Login
Now, if you want to offer more options to your customers to log in to your site, you can try out the WooCommerce social login extension. With the help of this one, your customers can log into your site using the login credentials of a lot of other popular sites. These include Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. This really reduces the pressure on customers to remember multiple user credentials. And, as a result, there will be better chances of conversion on your store. Customers can simply go to their account page and link or de-link as many social media accounts as they want.
Studies have repeatedly pointed out that a lot of eCommerce customers do prefer the social login option as it feels more personalized. You can read more about WooCommerce personalization options in another article.
Make sure the images are optimized
One of the primary requirements of online shoppers is to be able to view clear product images before making a purchase. You need to make sure that your mobile shoppers too are able to get the best experience in this regard. Using images only when it is really useful is key here. A lot of images might increase your page load time and as a result the customer experience would see a downward spiral. Be very clear about your use of images and make sure your product pages have only relevant images.
Now, you really can’t use images on an online store. All you can do is to make sure that the images you upload are optimized for a seamless experience. Here is a tool that would help you optimize your images without losing out on quality.
Smush Image Compression and Optimization
With the help of this plugin, you can easily resize and optimize your images before uploading them on your site. It ensures that the quality of your images are not lost during the compression. You can define a breadth and width for large images and they will be scaled down based on that.
Ensure quick page loading times
Most of the specific optimization practices we mentioned here should lead to one aspect, that is a fast loading site. According to experts, a delay of more than three seconds in loading the site would result in the customers going elsewhere. When you get this right, you will be able to see that the customer experience as well as the conversion rate is improving.
Conclusion
As a large number of online shoppers prefer a mobile device to do their shopping, store owners across the world are paying more attention to mobile experience. Basically, a customer needs to be able to get a consistent experience from your brand irrespective of the device they are using. In a shopping landscape that is leaning a lot towards involving multiple sales and engagement channels, this is all the more important. In this article, we have discussed some of the optimization strategies for a seamless mobile experience. Making good use of analytics insights, and thoroughly testing your strategies would make sure that your execution is right. Share with us if you have a unique strategy to improve WooCommerce customer experience for mobile users.
