Many people tend to think of all mobile use as the same. However it’s often defined as a tablet, plus smartphone, and especially from a commerce perspective, they’re very different things. If you run a marketplace or storefront, segment your analysis into three groups: desktop, tablet, and smartphone.
Part of the difference comes from the fact that users engage with the online world in three postures: creation (often on a computer with a keyword), interaction (usually with a smartphone), and consumption (with a tablet). Mixing tablets and mobile phones into a single category is a dangerous mistake. And people buy more media on a tablet than they do on a PC because that’s where they consume the content.
Your results will vary. It will depend on whether you’re an acquisition- or loyalty –focused e-commerce site; on whether your buyers are buying from a table, a phone, or a desktop; and on a variety of other critical dimensions. The only way you can deal with this is to measure, learn, and segment correctly.
If you’re an online retailer, you can get initial conversion rates of around 2%, which will vary by vertical, but if you can achieve 10%, you’re doing incredibly well. If your visitors arrive with a high intent to buy, you’ll do better, but you’ll have to invest elsewhere to get them into that mindset.
Sixty-five percent of people who start your purchase funnel will abandon their purchase before paying for it. In e-commerce specifically, 79% of online shoppers spend at least 50% of their shopping time researching products. Forty-four percent of online shoppers begin by using a search engine.
Don’t just think “mobile first.” Think “search first,” and invest in instrumenting search metrics on your website and within your product to see what users are looking for and what they’re not able to find.