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Webinar spells out five big mistakes retailers are making with mobile this year

As the holiday shopping season really gets underway, retailers need to make their online shopping experiences as frictionless as possible. This presentation explores some ways they can.

November 24, 2014 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

Retail Customer Experience recently hosted a live webinar, "Get Ready for the Holidays: Five Critical Mistakes in the Mobile Shopping Experience," sponsored by Jumio.

During the event, Ingrid Pinheiro, marketing director for Jumio, laid out some statistics that underscore just how pivotal mobile consumers have become to retail:

There are 1.75 billion worldwide mobile users, and 56 percent of U.S. adults have a smartphone
More than 50 percent of retail traffic is now mobile
M-commerce is projected to grow 33 percent year over year, through at least 2017
One-fourth of shoppers are engaging in online retail strictly via mobile
41 percent of smartphone owners have made a purchase from their mobile phone

Pinheiro then laid out five critical mistakes and challenges that trip up both mobile retailers and shoppers on their way to a successful checkout:

Difficulty of entering information during the checkout process

Pinheiro noted that the average mobile checkout requires 75 keystrokes — which translates to 75 chances for error. "All of that is a very frustrating component in the mobile checkout experience," she said.

Slow checkout speed

Those 75 keystrokes average out to about two minutes, for most users. "That's without even making mistakes," she said. "The ultimate goal is to eliminate 75 keystrokes and almost two minutes in checkout time."

Sites that force users to register for an account

Site registration turns up as a top barrier to purchase, Pinheiro said. She gave the example of one retailer that cut their abandonment rate in half, just by removing any mention of creating a user account, and of another retailer that added $300 million in annual revenue, just by removing registration.

"[This] has been identified as a stumbling block for mobile shopping over the past couple of years, and so what happens is that when mobile shoppers do come to a site that still requires that, the tolerance has gone down and the frustration has gone up. They've been to other sites that don't require that anymore."

A poor overall mobile experience

In a real-time poll conducted during the webinar, an overall poor mobile experience was the No. 1 complaint among audience members. "It's really about the checkout flow in the mobile experience," she said.

Eighty-eight percent of mobile shoppers say they have encountered a negative experience. A third of those consumers will wait a year before returning to the site, and a third of those will just give up on that retailer all together.

Some tips offered on improving the mobile checkout experience included an emphasis on shaving as much time off of page and image load as possible, creating a path to checkout that contains as few steps as possible, and rich auto-complete features.

Security concerns

When it comes to security, Pinheiro used a "yin yang" analogy — on the one hand, there is the consumer concern about payment security, and on the other side of that circle is the concern about too many security checks, more than necessary, and losing sales because of them.

"We saw a certain percentage of people concerned about payment security," she said. "But in the same results, we were looking at the same amount of people saying they thought there were excessive security checks on a lot of the sites they were visiting.

"Efficiency and a good experience have to be balanced with the idea that security is also important."

The entire webinar, which includes suggestions on how to tackle these five issues, is available on-demand at no charge.

(Photo by Jason Howie.)