Weekly Media Note #155 from Lance Hanish: Get Mobile Friendly Now!

Furniture World News Desk on 10/24/2016

By Lance Hanish

Get It! Get Mobile-Friendly Now!!!

It's Time To Prepare For A Mobile Business Boom & Black Friday



Did you know:

1. Users spend 177 minutes on mobile phones per day.
2. People are five times more likely to leave a mobile site that isn’t mobile-friendly.
3. Nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds.
4. 9 out of 10 people say these multiple screens for tasks on their mobile device.

For some reason, businesses do not understand the importance of having a mobile- friendly website. Each year, the same thing happens. In a random survey of 77 separate business websites, only 1 (1.3%) scored an ‘A’ rating (292 out of 300). Five (7) (9.1%) earned a Good (B) rating overall. At the other end of the scale, 24 (31.2%) failed with Extremely Poor numbers (Below 200 out of 300), the lowest of which registered an 089 out of 300. Only 1 had a Good rating for Mobile Speed. And only 2 had a Exel (perfect) rating for Desktop Speed. That’s 2.6%. If you, as a CEO, had directed your staff to make sure your company’s website is mobile-friendly, they have failed to deliver….once again…for another year.

And you wonder why you are not succeeding in eCommerce? You wonder why you are not reaching those who could, should or would buy from you at your brick-and-mortar location? Why your traffic is down? Why your ROI is down...Why your ‘digital/mobile’ spend is not living up to the promises others gave you? The reason for your not meeting the numbers is not the economy. It’s you. Your failure to make your business mobile friendly costs you each and every day. And your competition knows this is your biggest
weakness. After all, you are all selling the same thing. And they are taking advantage of you … right now!

Companies and retailers for whom online shopping is a big component of their annual sales already know that Black Friday and the period immediately following it are make- or-break sales days. They also have seen and capitalized on the trend to extend shopping periods and sales not just over the course of days but over the full complement of devices. Mobile capability is not just important to consumers…it’s expected. Are you ready? Are you ready to compete?

Mobile is becoming our favored shopping device

ComScore revealed that internet use on mobile devices exceeded the desktop for the first time in 2014. Furthermore, mobile web traffic was nearly double that of desktop during the peak holiday shopping period. Even with this growth in mobile traffic, actual conversions/transactions still frequently happened on a desktop. In 2015, many analysts posited that smartphones in particular started to hold their own in the Black Friday shopping arena, pulling in record-value shopping carts and, at least in certain parts of the day, driving one in three sales.

Mobile is no longer just exclusively a Black Friday thing any more. IBM’s 2013 Black Friday report indicated that mobile sales exceeded 25% of total online sales on Thanksgiving Day itself (Imagine, if you will, being happily satisfied by your Thanksgiving meal, taking a little power nap and then checking out some early shopping bargains on your mobile device). Bottom line: the peak shopping period does not wait until the Friday after Thanksgiving, and the peak is beginning more and more frequently on mobile devices first, in many cases because push notifications and retail app installations send users reasons to shop right away.

Staying ahead of the user experience

What does this mean for e-commerce retailers? Many of the concerns for mobile are the same as for desktop shopping, ensuring that product and inventory information is up-to- date and that the site doesn’t crash or deliver sluggish results are basics. It comes down to user experience, user experience and … user experience. Consumers’ expectations are that their experience on mobile will be better than or equal to their desktop experience, which means that you have special considerations to ensure the responsiveness required.

Here are three points that warrant additional attention for mobile-specific shopping:

• Optimize website for mobile: Can the consumer see what they want and easily get the information needed? Is the search function easy to use? Is the site easy to navigate? The consumer needs to find what they want quickly or they will move on. You can help ensure that the visitor to your site experiences the most optimal experience for his device. Research shows that consumers often conduct much of their pre-purchase research on mobile and eventually “pull the trigger” later on desktop. This process (research, search, saving items for later, shopping cart functionality) should be seamless and carry over across to devices to facilitate easier purchasing follow-through.
  
  
• Optimize website for performance (on mobile and otherwise): Performance/ speed of your site overall and particularly of page loads is important for your e- commerce site regardless of whether you’re preparing for desktop or mobile users. Mobile users, by definition, though, are often on-the-go and less likely to wait around for results to appear. Make sure your site performs equally well on all platforms.
  
  
• Optimize website for purchases: If a consumer is ready to make a purchase and has gone through the whole purchasing journey and gets to the end and encounters trouble, they are not going to follow through. Seven out of ten people abandon shopping carts online even when they are not encountering hiccups in the payment process. Don’t make this last step the misstep in the buying cycle.

Don’t take your staff’s word for it. Go outside and have a pro look at it. They will come back to you with positive suggestions to fix it.

Get mobile-friendly now!

And for those in the home furnishings industry, the 77 companies surveyed were the top manufacturers in the business. And who was the top performers?

According to the CNA|SOPHIS / RetailPositive™ study, here are some of the home furnishing brand highlights:

• AICO earned #1 with an 100 for Mobile Friendliness; a 98 for Mobile Speed and a 100 for Desktop Speed finishing with an outstanding 295.
  
  
• Palliser Furniture and Aspen Home finished tied for #2 with a 96 for Mobile Friendliness; a 94 for Mobile Speed and a 98 for Desktop Speed finishing with a 288.

According to the CNA|SOPHIS / RetailPositive™ study, here are some of the Retail home furnishings highlights:

• IKEA earned the #1 spot for retailers in multiple DMAs with 267.
  
  
• Steinhafel’s earned the #1 spot for retailers in a single DMA with a 264.
  
  
• El Dorado Furniture earned the 3rd highest mark for retailers with a 263,

Complete individual manufacturer, retail and top DMA competitive listings are available by contacting Lance Hanish (lance@cnasophis.com) or (480) 619-8999.