When Mobile Shopping Carts Go Horribly Wrong

Sometimes when I’m at a Seattle Sounders game, it’ll dawn on me: gah I forgot to re-order my dog’s special fat-dog food. I’ll whip out my phone at halftime, login to Amazon, place my order. Done. Peace of mind. Though the use-cases may differ, mobile e-commerce shopping isn’t going anywhere. A bad or frustrating mobile shopping experience can make or break a customer’s relationship with your brand (and cost the business a lot of money).

Of course, not everyone has Amazon-level money to throw at the problem of designing an easy and efficient mobile checkout experience. They have huge teams dedicated to streamlining and improving every little microinteraction in their users’ shopping journeys, as a few little hiccups might cost the company many millions of dollars. So while most online retailers can’t allocate such resources, it’s still worth investing in an audit and improvement of that mobile checkout user experience.

But enough about Amazon (cut me some slack; I live in Seattle and can’t get away from Amazon and their free bananas). Let’s quickly consider a few ways mobile shopping carts go wrong.

• Putting too much cognitive load on the user. Maybe a user is trying to check out, and is offered too many options at once, in a way that’s not clear to them. Perhaps they can’t find what they’re looking for when they expect to find it (“where do I put in my coupon code? Will I get a chance on the next screen?”). This kind of uncertainty can and often will lead to frustration, increasing the potential for the user to abandon the task entirely.
• Page load times are too long. If a user has loaded a shopping cart with merchandise and tries to advance in the journey, only to be met with (essentially) a spinning loading wheel…well. Let’s just say the chances of abandoning ship at this point are high, especially if that user is making a first-time purchase with this particular retailer.
• Errors and error messages are unclear or frustrating. For instance, if a user tries to fill out a form and enters a phone number or credit card number, only to be told they needed to use a specific format, frustration builds.

And many, many more. This is why we’re excited to share one of our partners’ upcoming webinars on improving these mobile shopping experiences. While they approach the topic with a bit more of a marketing angle (“increasing conversions,” in this case), the simple truth of the matter is this: good UX will lead to increased conversions. Marketing and UX should live harmoniously, not at odds with one another.

Anyway! The webinar is called Improve your Mobile Checkout Conversions – The Complete Customer Journey, and will take place June 20th at 1pm ET. Partnering up to run this webinar are Forrester, Blue Acorn, and Addressy—all very well suited to host a very informative and useful event. Forrester will be covering the whats and whys of mobile shopping; Blue Acorn will cover e-commerce platform considerations; and Addressy will cover design best practices. This should be pretty juicy.

To sign up for the webinar, head over to Addressy.