Mobile shopping should be a top priority for your online store. With 76% of adults in the USA using smartphones to make purchases, it's clear that a mobile-friendly site is crucial.

Many stores however are still not optimized for mobile devices, even when using templates. PewResearch indicates that mobile shopping is most popular among adults under 50 and more prevalent with women. Understanding these trends can help you build and advertise your store more effectively. So ensure that your site is small screen friendly, or create a dedicated mobile version to cover all your bases.

One Solution: Apps for Mobile Shopping

A mobile shopping app streamlines the shopping experience by allowing users to browse products, read  reviews, and make purchases directly from their smartphones. These apps connect to secure payment  systems and often include features like push notifications and location-based services. 

However, developing a high quality app requires significant investment in software development,  design, and ongoing maintenance. For small business owners, these costs can be expensive, making it  difficult to compete with larger companies that have more resources. Plus, with a niche store, it is completely unnecessary.

Solutions for Small Online Business Owners

Optimize your site: A faster website will load more quickly, not just on computers, but on mobile devices as well. Mobile device shoppers are much more sensitive to page speed than computer shoppers. Google has PageSpeed Insights, that will give you suggestions on what you can do to make your store load and operate faster.

Optimize your images: Online stores typically have a lot of images on them to show the product off and un-optimized images will load much slower. Having optimized images will allow you have larger pictures on your site as well. There are free and paid tools you can find online for optimizing and compressing images. We use our Photoshop program to optimize images for the web. But look around and try a few out to see which one brings you the best quality at the smallest file size.

Check Your Site Design on Mobile Devices: Most templates these days are "mobile ready". But even still if your image isn't sized right, or your content runs long, it might translate weird when you change to mobile view. So make sure that when designing your site, always check the mobile view before publishing.

Optimizing your site and your images, as well as getting your PageSpeed Insights corrected, will greatly help your store load better on mobile devices anyway. So do as much as you can to tap into that huge part of the shopping market!

Have you see our other Deadly Sins of Online Store Design? Check them out.