Magento Initiative Aims to Boost Small Business Sales on Mobile

The Mobile Optimization Initiative from Magento was introduced to help retailers capitalize on the amount of time consumer spend on their mobile devices.

Even though more people are making smartphones their primary channel to shop online, converting sales on mobile devices is an ongoing problem. According to Magento, the goal of the Mobile Optimization Initiative is to help retailers tackle the mCommerce problem.

The company says this will require businesses to optimize their mobile commerce platform to deliver a memorable experience for users. For small business owners who have yet to address this issue in a mobile-first world, the losses can be substantial.

On the company blog, Peter Sheldon, Senior Director of Commerce Strategy, Magento, addressed this very issue. Sheldon said, “While smartphones continue to gain share as a primary channel for consumers to shop online, the ratio of mobile views to conversions lags in comparison to desktop.”

Sheldon’s point is backed by data from Brilliance, which showed mobile has the highest abandonment rate at 85.65%, followed by tablets at 80.74%, and desktops at 73.07%.

The smaller the screen size, the higher the cart abandonment rate. This is because the vast majority of businesses have yet to optimize their ecommerce for mobile.

Magento Mobile Optimization Initiative

There is clearly a problem when it comes to mobile conversion. Even with these issues, consumers are spending more time shopping on their smartphones.

This is especially true for young consumers. According to Adobe Digital Insights, a quarter of all back to school shopping time in 2018 was spent on a smartphone. But the data from Brilliance holds true as the conversion rate from desktops was higher with an average basket size of $142 compared to $111 for smartphones.

Magento looks to solve the problem by collaborating with its technology partners PayPal and HiConversion. Together the companies have carried out more than 250 experiments to gather data from merchants around the world.

The result has been three million data points which will be used to help merchants deliver higher conversion rates and better buying experiences. The company says it will anonymize what it has learned from the experiments and share the information across its Magento Community to benefit everyone.

Mobile Checkout Optimization

The initiative is bringing together 15 system integrators to deliver professional services. These will include Web 2 Market, Redstage, Razoyo, Something Digital, Imagination Media, Wagento, ICUBE, JH, Gene, IWD Agency and Lima Consulting Group.

To date, Magento says more than 60 merchants have signed on and that the effort is expanding globally.

The Mobile Optimization Initiative will give retailers complimentary mobile checkout funnel assessment, optimized campaign design and implementation, and professional services during the active program.

Participating merchants will be able to detect ‘friction points’ in each merchant’s checkout funnel by leveraging HiConversion’s analytics to come up with data driven test hypotheses.

Additional benefits include A/B experiments run as a single optimization campaign; optimization using adaptive algorithms; and a final report encompassing results and actionable insights.

So far this has resulted in participating merchants increasing their average revenue per visit by 7.5 percent, Magento says. According to the company, a better mobile buying experience has also translated into a better desktop buying experience.

You can learn more about the Magento Mobile Optimization Initiative here.

Image: Magento

This article, "Magento Initiative Aims to Boost Small Business Sales on Mobile" was first published on Small Business Trends