As a furniture retailer with both ecommerce and brick-and-mortar stores, you recognize the importance of meeting your customers' expectations. That means allowing them to learn about your business and browse your products from any device they have, including mobile devices.
You’ve probably heard the term mobile responsiveness, which is one consideration for a mobile ecommerce site, but what exactly does that mean? Let’s look at the impact of mobile responsiveness and key design tips for your mobile furniture ecommerce website.
Responsive web design is when your furniture ecommerce website is designed to adapt to the screen size of the device being used. The goal of mobile responsiveness is to optimize your site, ensuring consistent rendering across a range of devices.
Search engines like Google may rank mobile-friendly websites higher since they provide a better user experience, and ranking is critical for sales growth. With the prevalence of cross-device shopping, you need mobile responsiveness to ensure your site remains at the top of furniture search results.
Once shoppers find your site through Google or other search engines, what design tips will help you drive sales once visitors land on your website?
Here are our top recommendations for optimizing your furniture ecommerce site:
Because of the small screen sign, browsing a website on a mobile device requires an easy-to-navigate structure. When designing your website, you’ll need to use best practices for navigation, including:
A clear menu structure. Improve mobile user experience with an easy-to-navigate, streamlined website structure that displays categories and subcategories logically. Visitors should be able to intuitively move around your mobile ecommerce website.
Breadcrumb navigation. Enable visitors to visualize where they are within the structure by adding breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs act as a visual guide, showcasing the user's path within the website's hierarchy. Including breadcrumbs helps visitors understand their location on the site and navigate backward if needed.
Hamburger navigation menus. On a desktop, your header, menu, and footer appear horizontally across the larger screen. For mobile navigation, the menus should collapse behind a hamburger button.
Touch-friendly gestures. On mobile devices, users expect to move easily around the site with gestures like swiping, tapping, and pinching. Touch-based interactions provide intuitive controls for the shopper, improving the overall mobile experience.
Don’t start from scratch with a traditional ecommerce vendor. Instead, work with a furniture-focused platform vendor who understands how furniture shoppers move around a website.
Searching for anything on a mobile device can be challenging. When it comes to complex furniture attributes, grouping, and configurations, your mobile website visitors require efficient search functionality. Make sure you have advanced search and sort technologies with user-friendly facets and filters.
Building an optimized mobile searchandising strategy requires that mobile users can easily narrow their selection by types of product or product options and filter them based on attributes such as pricing.
Stay ahead of the tech curve with an ecommerce partner that monitors technology advancements and retail furniture trends. The Blueport platform incorporates new technologies that fine-tune search results for furniture synonyms, such as couch/sofa or server/buffet. This eliminates the necessity for manual curation of all potential options.
You already know that you need relevant images on your furniture ecommerce site, but because of the small screen size, a mobile shopper must be able to zoom in and out on images to see product details.
Images should be resized without losing quality to avoid distortion, but designing a website for mobile users also means including mobile-optimized graphics. Use tools that allow mobile specific images for smaller screen sizes to help create an optimal mobile experience.
Use an ecommerce platform that can handle the robust visual needs of furniture retailers and shoppers on mobile devices. An out-of-the-box content management and product information management system specifically designed for online furniture sales will get you to the goal faster.
Completing forms on mobile devices can be challenging, so you must implement an optimized checkout process to minimize friction. How important is this? According to Tech Report, the abandoned cart rate is higher for mobile shoppers than desktop users.
You can maximize conversion rates for mobile shoppers by removing unnecessary checkout steps and simplifying form fields. Make sure checkout forms are optimized for smaller screens. In addition, include:
Check out these tips for optimizing your checkout process.
A mobile furniture ecommerce design enables your website to span desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones. It’s paramount for delivering a seamless furniture shopping experience and essential to your merchandising strategy.
Download Furniture Ecommerce: A Merchandising Playbook today and discover how to guide your customers through the non-linear, omnichannel shopping journey that increasingly includes mobile search.