Chapter 19

Ten Ways to Reach Mobile Shoppers

As I write this, I just covered eBay’s annual Analyst Day meeting. Its CEO spent a good portion of his opening remarks discussing not auctions, not eBay stores, but the rise of mobile commerce. If eBay realizes that a key to increasing its business in the coming years is the number of individuals around the world who use tablets and smartphones to go online, you should, too.

In this Part of Tens chapter, you get ten suggestions for making your online store just as effective with mobile shoppers as with those who are sitting at a desktop. Think about some of these things when choosing a host or designing a store; you can implement other suggestions any time to expand your customer base.

Make Your Online Store Mobile-Friendly

You’ve probably seen websites that look exactly the same as their big-screen counterparts. Chances are they appear slowly and are difficult to read. You’ve probably also seen sites that look totally different on a mobile device than they do on a desktop computer. Those are simplified, with rows of easy-to-find and easy-to-click links, few graphics, and a rudimentary layout. These appear quickly and it’s easy to tap what you need.

The question is, how do you get one of those sites or storefronts that is tailored to appear easily and simply on the small screen? You can hire a programmer (an option also mentioned in the “Create an App” section, later in this chapter) or you can choose a shopping cart program or e-commerce host that does the conversion for you automatically.

A growing number of e-commerce hosts create a mobile-friendly version for you for no extra cost. They include Jimdo (www.jimdo.com), Magento (www.magento.com), Shopify (www.shopify.com), and Pinnacle Cart (www.pinnaclecart.com), to name a few. If it's important to you to have a mobile site as well as a conventional one, make sure the e-commerce host you choose does this for you as part of your hosting package.

A service called Mobify (www.mobify.com) converts your website to a format that can easily be viewed and navigated on a mobile device. You can also use an online utility called Onbile (www.grovo.com/onbile) to create your own mobile site.

Keep Your Presentation Ultra-Simple

Your conventional website or storefront might have a Flash animation as an introduction; it might feature video clips and content arranged in multiple columns. That’s all well and good, but you need to keep all these flashy elements off your mobile site.

Shoppers just want to find what they’re looking for quickly and be able to pay for it with a few mouse clicks. If they have to wait too long for a page to load because it’s too complicated, they’ll simply give up and go elsewhere. With that harsh fact in mind, it’s wise to adhere to the following rules of mobile simplicity:

Invite shoppers to explore. Less is more when it comes to shopping. Your initial screen should include just the most important links to your catalog or website. This allows visitors to decide quickly where to click.

Make purchases simple. In Chapter 6 you learn about organizing a website to keep shopping simple. On a mobile site, it’s essential to be able to add an item to a shopping cart and then make a purchase with a minimum of mouse clicks.

Smartphones and mobile devices are all about convenience, so your mobile commerce site should echo what mobile users already want and expect from an online shopping experience.

Enable Mobile Device Payments

If, like many online businesspeople, you also operate a brick-and-mortar store or sell at flea markets or art fairs, it pays to sign up with a mobile payment service so people can pay you wherever you are. The best-known such service is called Square Payments (www.square.com).

Other companies have created payment systems that work with mobile devices. Check out PayPal Here (www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader) and Intuit GoPayment (http://payments.intuit.com/mobile_credit_card_processing). All these services work by means of a device called a dongle that plugs into a smartphone and enables it to connect to a payment network.

Create an App

The ultimate way to give your store a functional presence on a smartphone or tablet is to create an app for it. An app performs lots of essential business functions:

It’s embedded into the device. Once a user downloads and installs an app, it’s there in the device. It is assigned a shortcut, and the user can place that shortcut right on his or her home screen for the ultimate in convenience.

It promotes your products. If you have Groupon’s popular app, you know that the daily deal site uses the app as a promotional tool; you see today’s special deals the moment you open it up.

It makes your site easy to use. The app can be configured to store user information so it doesn’t have to be entered at checkout; a purchase might take just one or two clicks.

If creating an app is beyond the reach of your small business, you can hire a programmer to create an app just for you, with the features you want. That, at least, is the ultimate goal. But hiring such a programmer might be beyond the reach of those businesses on a shoestring budget. Still, you might consider a simple app; it makes your business look legitimate and cutting-edge, and gives you added credibility.

Sites like Intellectsoft (www.intellectsoft.co.uk/iphone_applications_development.html) give you an estimate on how much your own app might cost.

Offer a Coupon Deal They Can’t Refuse

Coupons are highly effective promotional tools that attract devoted (and on occasion, deal-obsessed) shoppers. The latest trend is to have coupons delivered to consumers’ smartphones; they don’t necessarily have to appear in print at all.

With a little effort, you can create coupons that you post on your website or in your store so that customers can download them to their phones. The free service Keypons (www.keypons.net) makes it easy for you to assign a name to your offer, enter the specifics in a form (whether the coupon is for 10 percent off, for example) and enter instructions on how the shopper should redeem it ("Text 'save cleaning' to 42424," for example). One advantage of using a coupon creation service is that you can track the effectiveness of the promotion. You get reports on how many people saw your coupon, how many used it, how many passed it on to their friends, and so on.

Consider a Mobile-Only Shopping Cart Provider

Some shopping cart/e-commerce hosting services give their customers a mobile version of their online storefronts. That version is probably good enough for most small business owners. But if most of your customers use mobile devices, or if you are just starting out and want to focus exclusively on mobile commerce, create your store especially for the “small screen” with a mobile shopping cart.

Service providers like 2ergo (www.2ergo.com) and asknet (www.asknet.com) work from the ground up with mobile sites, so they are familiar with what platforms to work with, what size constraints they have to meet, and so on, as well as features like mobile coupons, which are described in the preceding section.

Go Beyond “Mobile” to Include “Social”

Social marketing is a natural activity on mobile devices. Your e-commerce presentation can feed into this by making it easy for mobile shoppers to connect with their friends and online acquaintances and spread the word about your products and services. Here are some suggestions:

Take advantage of mobile reviews. Give your visitors a chance to post reviews of your store or your products; mobile web surfers love reviews and seek them out.

Help shoppers “pin” your products. Provide a button that enables visitors to quickly “pin” items they like to the social marketing site Pinterest.

Help reviews share their views. Provide one-touch buttons so those who leave reviews for you can share those reviews with their friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Your mobile site should be a place that encourages shoppers to return; enabling interaction with the site gets them involved and gives them a reason to check back on a regular basis.

Keep Your Mobile Site Cross-Platform

It’s always important to make sure your web content appears the way you want no matter what computer platform or browser your visitor uses. It’s even more important when the content appears on a tablet or smartphone.

Be sure to test your site to make sure the appearance is accurate on the most popular (iPhone, Android) platforms and on browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Android’s built-in browser.

Focus on Shoppers Who Are Likely Buyers

A study by Apsalar (apsalar.com/blog/2012/09/apsalar-more-mobile-apps-lead-to-engagement-deficit-disorder) indicates that mobile shoppers are not necessarily engaged buyers. The sheer number of apps they have installed and the number of things demanding their attention on their smartphones mean they tend not to follow through with transactions on their mobile devices.

But there’s good news. You already have a set of engaged customers — shoppers who have already purchased from you, who “Like” you on Facebook, who have chosen to subscribe to your newsletter if you have one. These are customers you can drive to your mobile site. Offer them special promotions and rewards, and encourage them to tell their friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Contact Customers in Your Area with a Geofence

This advanced tip combines the location-based marketing described in Chapter 12 with mobile devices. A geofence is a location that you specify using a service such as Thumbvista (www.thumbvista.com). Logically, this would be the location of your brick-and-mortar store if you have one. It could also be an art fair or another event in which you are participating.

When someone nears or passes by the geofence, the service sends a text message to the mobile devices of individuals who have already opted in to receive such messages. The text message might say “50 percent off pottery today only!” For customers who have already made purchases from you and who have opted in as part of one of your e-mail campaigns, this can be a welcome alert that might well result in a purchase.