Today’s shoppers carry their preferred shopping method in their pockets, purses and hands. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and other small, handy gadgets have fueled a steady change in buyer behavior. Internet Retailer points to figures from comSCORE indicating a 27.7 percent rise in first-half mobile commerce sales between 2012 and 2013 alone, accounting for some $10.6 billion overall. But a whopping 61 percent of users in one study stated that they would not visit a mobile website a second time if the first experience wasn’t sufficiently user friendly, according to UserZoom.
Online retailers need to make it as easy as possible for shoppers to zip through their site, see exactly what they’re looking for and check out — and many websites aren’t managing it. Because of this many online retailers are missing out on lead generation opportunities due to abandonment.
What are these retailers doing wrong?
Some may be presenting their audience with too much information, while others are erring in the opposite direction. Full-sized websites tend to scale poorly on smaller screens, forcing viewers to squint their way through microscopic fonts and scroll endlessly to read a single page. At the same time, however, stripped-down “mobile-only” versions of these websites may be easy to read and navigate, but they offer so little information in this form that the company fails to sell itself properly.
Responsive websites
Responsive websites represent an innovative middle ground between these two extremes. These sites are fully built out with all the features any viewer would expect to see when viewing it from a desktop computer. But the style sheets and images are coded in such a way that they scale or reorient themselves according to each visitor’s screen size. The result is a site that delivers as much functionality as possible for any given device, providing a better user experience. This approach not only allows for optimal flexibility, but it also eliminates the need to build and maintain separate versions of the site.
Even this new technology is seeing exciting new refinements. An adaptive design, for instance, detects not only the screen size but the individual device’s unique functionality. Internet Retailer notes that Beyond the Rack quadrupled its smartphone-based sales by switching to an adaptive website. Could the same bright future be in store for your business?
