Online shopping has been evolving. No longer are people confined to desktop computers and laptops, but free to shop anywhere, at any time using their smart phones and tablets.
If you’re trying to grow a web-based business, no matter how small, it’s extremely important to cater to all your customers and their shopping methods. With or without a store front, you need your website to help drive profits. Because so many customers are looking at your website with their phones or tablets, mobile optimisation is crucial to ensuring they have a good browsing experience instead of getting frustrated and looking elsewhere. There are a few key points to keep in mind:
Make sure text and graphics on your website translate well to mobile browsers. If not, your potential customers are going to be looking at gibberish, and if that happens you know they won’t stay on your site for long. If you use a host for your website, check to see if they have a mobile optimisation feature or if they provide assistance on how to best design your site for mobile devices.
Here at MyWork, we offer the option of mobile responsive web design to both current and brand new clients. We know that business is largely about competition, and we want to help you get an advantage with your customers. Don’t lose business simply because your competitors have a more mobile friendly website than you! Take a look at your competition’s websites to see how they are set up. Are they easier to navigate than yours? Is their text way too small or large for a mobile device? You’ll see that having a mobile optimised website can make all the difference. These are the types of factors you need to focus on to ensure customers have a good experience when browsing your website from a mobile device.
Still not convinced it’s worth it? Here are some statistics that demonstrate the significance of the smart phone/tablet shopping market.
- Australia’s internet audience reached 16.2 million in May 2012 – Nielsen Australian Online Landscape Review
- An estimated 18% (up from 8%) of Australian households now own at least one tablet device. Tablet devices were forecast to reach 39% of homes by 2013 – Nielsen, Australian Online Consumer Report
- An estimated 48% of Australians aged 16+ years own a smartphone (35% in Q1 2011) –Nielsen Australian Multi-Screen Report
- Time spent accessing mobile internet continues its upward trend: 4.2 hours per week, up 20% from 3.5 hours in 2010 – Nielsen, Australian Online Consumer Report
- 9. 24% of Australian smartphone users take their phones with them when shopping to research products, and 22% of them change their minds while in-store about a purchase after completing a mobile search – Our Mobile Planet: Australia – Understanding The Mobile Consumer’s Report
- 61% of mobile users are unlikely to return to a site that they had trouble accessing from their phone – Our Mobile Planet: Australia – Understanding The Mobile Consumer’s Report
- Australia has the second highest smartphone usage by population density, second only to Singapore – Our Mobile Planet: Australia – Understanding The Mobile Consumer’s Report
- 51% of smartphone users access internet via their mobile multiple times a day – Our Mobile Planet: Australia – Understanding The Mobile Consumer’s Report