UK retailers starting to meet shoppers’ mobile-first expectations, Ve

The proportion of Brits using their smartphones to make purchases online during the lead up to Christmas has increased by 44% compared to last year, according to research by Ve. And mobile sales will rise to over 50% during the Black Friday weekend.

Ve, which develops e-commerce technologies for the likes of Clare’s Accessories and The Body Shop, examined 50 million online browser sessions across 3,000 retail websites, during the third quarter of 2017 and the same period this year.

“Our data indicates that UK retailers are beginning to meet the mobile-first expectations of the modern online shopper and in good time, given the continued demise of the desktop PC and even the tablet – all of which are fading towards irrelevance as the mobile experience improves,” says CEO David Marrinan-Hayes.

“This bodes very well for brands in the run-up to Black Friday and the whole of the crucial ‘Golden Quarter’, as they look to capitalise on the annual pre-December rush. It also presents marketers with an opportunity to engage the always-on customer; a key demographic who carry and regularly check their mobile devices.”

The main challenge now is to develop and deploy mobile experiences that are relevant and bring value to each potential customer. Done correctly, personalised messages and content delivered direct-to-mobile via SMS or web push notifications, can be welcome interruptions and lead a customer into making a purchase, he concludes.

In order to make sure that such mobile-based transactions are successful, one method can be to simply utilise a decent platform such as ShopWired. This alternative to Shopify is going to enable any ecommerce business to provide its customers with the kind of mobile experience that they expect and deserve.

The result of that should be a greater number of customers, higher sales, and a healthier business in general.