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Mobile first and last and always

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To paraphrase the somewhat grandiose song from the late ‘80s by the The Sisters of Mercy: isn’t it time you were mobile first and last and always?

No one can ignore that mobile has driven much of the growth over the past year or two in ecommerce and, if proof were needed, Black Friday and the Christmas peak has shown that mobile is now an essential part of the shopping journey for many consumers.

As our lead story points out, 54% of ecommerce sales in the UK comes from mobile – and that is just sales. As I have said before, you can bet that mobile played a significant part in many of the remaining 46% of sales online too – be it research, showrooming, following up a marketing messaging, or just looking for a shop on a map.

But still many retailers are failing to offer what shoppers want. According to research by Shopgate delivered in its The Mobile Method: The Apps Commerce Outlook for 2018 report, 45% of shoppers are abandoning mobile shopping sprees and the checkout stage. Seriously?

Maybe I have been doing this job too long, but there are so many ways to stop this happening that are now ecommerce 101 that I am surprised that it still occurs at all.

Trust about data is another barrier to using mobile, with many in all age groups fearful that their data and/or identity is going to be pinched online.

Hopefully, when GDPR is brought to bear in May, this fear can start to be squashed – at least the fear that the big bad corporations are going to use that data to bombard them with messages from the dark side (from the Black Planet, to labour the Sisters of Mercy link).

But these are really wishy-washy reasons not to adapt your operations to be mobile first. The real reason that many don’t complete shopping on a mobile is simply poor experience. As the report points out, 90% of shoppers that do regularly shop on mobile as their first port of call do so on apps. The reason? Because apps work and offer a great experience.

This is why Amazon does so well on mobile – it has a great user experience with its apps.

Of course, there are many tactics that retailer can adopt to make their mobile web and app experience better – there are six of them here – but really it comes down to having a mobile mindset. That is the real force that makes a retailer mobile first: it is a mind set that involves thinking as an omnichannel shopper would and working out how best to deliver that if only the mobile was available.

Of course, people will use the web and stores, but think how mobile drives both of those. What can you do to both with mobile that makes it all a better experience? This is, to me, what mobile first really means. And if you go down that path then you will be mobile first and last and always.

IMAGE langll on Pixabay

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