Mobile Commerce for Magento Stores

Retail mobile commerce sales in the US currently total more than $550 billion, which makes up 38% of all eCommerce sales.

Worldwide, the mCommerce market accounts for over $2 trillion in retail sales, which is 57% of the entire eCommerce market.

This shows two things - one, there are a massive number of people buying things on mobile, and two, that there is still a lot of room for growth in one of the world’s biggest retail markets.

All this means that, if you’re running a Magento store, optimizing for mobile commerce is vital.

Any eCommerce store that does not make mobile commerce a priority risks providing a suboptimal user experience for around half of their customers.

Read on to learn how to optimize your Adobe Commerce/Magento store for mobile, and make sure you get your piece of the trillion dollar mCommerce pie.

Why Magento (aka Adobe Commerce) is Perfect for Mobile Commerce

Luckily, if you’ve chosen Magento (now rebranded as Adobe Commerce - we’ll use these two terms interchangeably) to build your online store, you’re in a great position to craft an amazing mobile shopping experience.

Magento is a modern eCommerce platform, with all the features you need to build a fast, responsive, mobile-friendly website - probably one of the reasons it’s the 3rd most popular platform for high-traffic eCommerce sites.

Here are four reasons why the Magento platform is a perfect fit for modern websites who want to provide a great experience for smartphone users.

Fast and Responsive

The Adobe Commerce platform is optimized for fast load speeds, a key component of a mobile-friendly website.

Magento uses the most up to date versions of PHP, HTML, CSS and SQL, which helps minimize lag and lets you build a blazing-fast website.

It also features responsive themes that are built, from the ground up, to adapt and fit whatever screen size or device your customers are using.

PWA Studio

Magento’s PWA Studio makes it quick and easy to turn your website into a Progressive Web App (PWA).

Progressive Web Apps are a great way to offer a more powerful, app-like experience on your website, while still making your website accessible in the browser.

Quick, Mobile-Friendly Checkout

The checkout flow is another important thing to get right on mobile. Magento lets you streamline your checkout and avoid unnecessary steps that hurt conversions, and includes instant purchase and all the necessary payment integrations you need.

Headless APIs

Magento is built to enable headless commerce, with APIs and out-of-the-box composable services that let you integrate the backend of your website with other platforms, such as mobile apps.

9 Steps to Mobile-Optimize Your Magento Store

Though Magento/Adobe Commerce comes with all the tools to let you build a mobile-friendly website, a lot of it comes down to how you put your store together.

It’s not foolproof, and you can just as easily go wrong and build a store that’s bloated and hard to use on mobile.

Here are nine steps to follow to make sure your online store provides a modern, mobile-first shopping experience for smartphone users.

1. Make It Fast

Site speed has a clear impact on conversions. 

Amazon once published data showing that they would lose 1% in sales for each additional 100ms in latency.

Google states that 53% of visitors will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

And it’s more important on mobile, where convenience is a higher priority with shoppers and devices have less processing power.

According to Shopify, a one-second improvement in load time can increase mobile conversion rate by 27%.

Speed is one of the first things you should look at when optimizing your Magento site for mobile. Do all you can to make sure your site is as fast as it can be.

2. Make It Responsive

Mobile-friendly sites are not just fast, they are responsive.

Responsive means that they automatically resize and adapt to different screen sizes.

Your site should adjust to a mobile-friendly layout for mobile users. All of this should fit within the smaller screen, without broken elements that are hidden, or force the user to scroll, because the layout is stuck on desktop mode.

It should also adapt and look natural on different mobile screen sizes, to fit the thousands of different mobile devices and models your customers are likely to use to visit your store.

3. Simplify Your Checkout

A lengthy checkout process is a common way stores lose conversions on mobile.

As we’ve already discussed, convenience and speed are king for mobile shoppers. They don’t want to go through six screens to complete their purchase. They’d rather just one or two taps and it be done.

Cut out any unnecessary steps in your checkout, and integrate with payment methods and mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc to make it as easy as possible for the user.

4. Optimize and Compress Images

Bloated images are a big reason for slow-loading websites, particularly on mobile.

Large images slow your site down, and they’re unnecessary in the first place, as mobile screen sizes are smaller and you don’t need to serve images with the same resolution as on desktop.

5. Make Your Website Touch-Friendly

There are different dynamics to take into account in order to optimize your store to work well on touch screens.

67% of consumers say they find mobile shopping more difficult because pages and links are too small to click on.

You also need to consider how people use smartphones - usually with one hand, interacting with the screen with the thumb.

You want to design your mobile UI so that it’s easy to use in one hand, with all key elements within thumb’s reach.

6. Rearrange Your Layout to Suit Smaller Screens

Aside from simply making sure everything fits in the screen, you’ll likely need to make some more changes to your UI to make it look good on a vertically-oriented, smaller-resolution screen.

Many mobile layouts suffer from poor use of space - either too much whitespace or not enough - after adapting from desktop to mobile.

Column or grid layouts might not work well on mobile, and you may need to move things around to maintain a hierarchy that makes sense (and drives conversions).

7. Prioritize the Most Important Elements

With less real estate available on the screen, pick and choose the most important details and elements to show to customers.

The “above the fold” section is critical - you don’t want this space taken up with anything non-vital.

Long sections of text may not work well on mobile as well, especially if it pushes CTAs or more important information lower down the page.

Consider minimizing some parts of your page for mobile - keep it available, but only if the user taps to expand the heading - and make sure your calls to action and important details like pricing and images clearly stand out.

8. Minimize Popups and Text Inputs

There are some more small touches you can make to your mobile Magento store to cut down the inconvenience many customers find when shopping on mobile.

Intrusive popups, for example, often feel much worse on mobile, where they take up the whole screen, and can be hard to clear.

Text input is less intuitive as well on mobile, where you don’t have a keyboard, so minimize this as much as you can, using pre-filled inputs and dropdown selectors more than open text fields.

9. Create a Mobile App

Finally, providing your customers with a mobile app is a key part of a good mobile commerce strategy.

Mobile apps offer a more user-friendly experience on mobile, without the browser taking up important space on the user’s screen, and the experience being smoother, faster, and designed specifically for mobile devices and touch screens.

Most eCommerce sites today work well on mobile, but only a small percentage of online stores have their own app. If you don’t, you’re missing out.

Learn more: 15 Mobile Commerce Best Practices to Follow

How to Build a Mobile App with Magento

Building a mobile app for your Magento store is easier than you might think, if you do it the right way.

There are a number of ways you can go about doing this. Here are three options you might consider:

Develop It Yourself

Adobe Commerce’s headless APIs give you all the tools you need to connect the backend of your store with a custom mobile app.

Unfortunately, it’s also extremely expensive and time-consuming to build mobile apps from scratch, along with adding a huge amount of complexity and financial overhead once you launch your apps.

Unless you have extensive mobile app development experience in your team, we’d advise against building custom mobile apps. And even if you do, it might not be the best approach.

Magento Mobile App Builders

Magento mobile app builders are an easier, and significantly cheaper, way to build an app for your store.

These sites tap into the Magento API for you, integrating with your store and letting you piece together your mobile app using a no-code app builder.

Some popular app builders that work with Magento/Adobe Commerce include:

• Simicart
• Magestore
• Knowband

But Magento mobile app builders are not ideal either - most are just too simple and too limited to allow you to build full-featured mobile apps that are going to be a positive asset for your business.

Convert Your Magento Store to an App with MobiLoud

The third option is to convert your Magento store to a mobile app with MobiLoud.

MobiLoud is a managed service to turn any website into native apps. It lets you convert everything you already have on your mobile website to apps that look and feel like custom, million-dollar builds.

For eCommerce stores, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when launching an app. Assuming your site already functions well on mobile, there are only a few small touches needed to turn it into an app, such as some native navigation UI, and push notifications.

MobiLoud makes those small additions, and ships amazing mobile apps for iOS and Android, without any work required from you.

The apps will be fully synchronized with your store, meaning you can update them easily at any time, and any integrations or custom features on your website will work exactly the same in the apps with no development required.

Why Your Magento Store Needs a Mobile App

A mobile-friendly website is essential, but the next step for any online store should be to have their own app.

Consumers spend more time in apps. Apps have higher engagement, higher AOV, and 157% higher conversion rates than mobile websites.

And apps are particularly powerful for loyalty and retention.

Once someone downloads your app, it’s so much more likely that they’ll come back and buy from you again.

Your brand stays top-of-mind, thanks to the app icon on the user’s home screen, and you can reach out to them with push notifications to nurture your relationship with them and encourage repeat business.

It also shows your brand as a true authority when you have your own app. You’ll be able to get into the app stores alongside other huge brands, and show any potential customers that you’re a real, legitimate brand that they can trust.

Wrapping Up: Magento Mobile Commerce with MobiLoud

If you want to develop a complete Magento mobile commerce strategy, you need a mobile app.

It takes just three easy steps to launch your own Magento mobile app with MobiLoud:

1. Ensure your site is fast, responsive and mobile-friendly.
2. Book a free consultation to discuss your project and any special requirements you may have, and get an interactive demo of your site as an app.
3. Sit back and relax, while our team builds your mobile apps, tests them, and publishes them on the app stores.

You can have your own mobile app, live, in the app stores, in less than a month, for just a few hundred dollars invested.

Book a demo call now to get started. If your Adobe Commerce site is already mobile friendly, you’ll find you’re 90% of the way to having your own mobile app, positioning your brand as an authority and generating more revenue from mobile shoppers.