Can you believe it is already the holiday season? Time does indeed fly by when you’re having fun – or you’re just too busy to notice the calendar change.
With consumers ready to shop until they drop, many will inevitably turn to the Internet for their presents – for others and for themselves. This is your chance to boost your sales, turn a profit, and share an egg nog with Santa Claus.
Rather than sit idly by and wait for the clicks to surge, you need to implement several measures to ensure you’re really ready for the influx of shoppers. One way to do this? Optimize your mobile forms, the bane of online shopping.
Here are five ways to optimize your mobile forms for the holiday season:
1. Allow Social Login for Shopping
One of the worst parts of shopping online is having to create an account. It requires typing in your personal information, receiving a confirmation code, and then getting endless promotional emails. This may be easier to complete on a desktop, but it’s a lot harder perform on a mobile phone.
Do you know how you can alleviate the frustration and improve the process? Use social login.
If you have noticed, a lot of websites have installed social login plugins to circumvent the account signups. All you do is provide a login feature for the visitor’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social network accounts.
This is so much simpler than having to go through the entire account creation headache.
2. Skip Username Signups – Be Different
As we have already agreed that it is difficult to create accounts on a smartphone, either because your fingers are too big or you’re too busy on the road. While you still aim for visitors to establish accounts, you can take advantage of another tool at your disposal, one that is a bit more modern.
Use an email identification or mobile number as their username by default. Unless it is absolutely essential, you can allow shoppers to use their emails or numbers as their account identification.
How simple is that?
3. Offer Users to Stay Signed in
Imagine having to sign in your account multiple times to complete your shopping. Whether it is because of an internal bug or they have exited the website, customers are oftentimes required to sign into their accounts on the very smartphone they used to buy that Boston Red Sox cap.
To ease the person’s UX, you can provide the option for users to stay signed in on their smartphones, tablets, or phablets for faster logins.
4. Predictive Search Results Are Necessary
One of the primary goals for any online shopping is to do as little typing as possible. You just want to browse, click, and purchase. That’s it.
Well, as an ecommerce giant, you want to facilitate this type of experience.
So, how can you do this? One simple trick is to employ predictive search results.
Shoppers can insert keywords of a particular item they want, and your coding will list results that resemble as closely as possible to the search. This is great for long searches, miscellaneous products, or shoppers on the go and don’t want to waste time typing.
Remember, any way you can limit your abandonment rate is an ace up your sleeve.
5. Feel the Need for Speed
In today’s world, everyone feels the need for speed. We are all in a rush and we cannot waste a fraction of a millisecond. If there is a bump, a hurdle, or an impediment, we lose our collective minds.
As a company, you need to realize this immediately. Rather than waiting for the customer complaints to flood your inbox, you’d be better off tackling this potential problem now.
What are we talking about? Speed. Ultimately, every website wants to have fast loading times. The research on this is pretty clear: Anytime it takes more than three seconds to load a page, a large number of people will abandon their search.
This is important to know. Remember, the holiday season is when consumers are stampeding through websites to shop until their hearts are content – or the endorphins have been maximized. You want to ensure your website can handle the traffic and that your mobile forms are quick to load. If it shuts down or is extremely slow, you could lose sales.
Yes, mobile forms can be annoying for users. They just want to purchase a product or a service and that is it. This is potentially why so many websites are installing guest checkouts. All you need to do is type in your name, address, email, and credit card number and you’re done – even that can be irksome!
With Christmas fast approaching, you must get your mobile app or mobile website prepared. This consists of making your pages load as fast as possible and determining if your forms are optimized and ready to be filled in. And there you have it!
