A new report was recently released from MarketLive, which gives a lot of great news for the digital marketing industry. For one, mobile traffic to ecommerce sites has rocketed up. Specifically, traffic on smart phones has gone up by 269% year over year from Q1 2014. This brings smart phone traffic up to about 27% of all traffic to these types of sites.
In addition, the number of orders being generated from smart phones is up 104% to a total of 13% of all transactions. While this is all great news, there is one glaring problem. About 90% of all the orders that are put ‘in the cart’ on smart phones are abandoned. This is a very high abandonment rate, and is essentially leaving a lot of money on the tablet for marketers.
Of course, it is impossible to completely eliminate the cart abandonment rate, but 90% is far too high. This shows us that marketers today need to make improvements on the way they are designing their sales process. There has been tremendous improvement in getting sites optimized for mobile, but there is still a long way to go in improving the conversion rates.
There are some significant issues facing marketers in this area. First, entering your credit card information on a smart phone is a difficult and annoying process on the best of sites. Using things like PayPal or attempting to implement newer technologies like Apple Pay and similar services may help to avoid this type of problem as time goes by. For now, however, marketers should be doing everything they can to streamline the checkout process. Having 90% of customers abandon their carts is a massive problem that is causing huge losses in profit.
