M-Commerce and the Importance of Product Search

Poor mobile shopping experiences are stopping transactions in their tracks - here’s why retailers need to optimise websites for the mobile generation.

This article was originally written for ITProPortal.

Mobile commerce - the process of shopping through a mobile device (typically a smartphone) - will continue to alter consumer shopping habits for a few years to come. Although the majority of mobile buying still occurs on tablets today (this year, £15.8 billion will be spent on tablets, representing more than 62% of total m-commerce sales),it's expected that by 2020 smartphones will dominate m-commerce and account for 52% of mobile transactions and £22.1 billion in sales (source).

While smartphones are already responsible for driving significant amounts of traffic to retailer sites, with a reported four in ten (39%) eCommerce transactions now involving multiple devices along the path to purchase (source), it is the sheer volume of smartphones owned (UK smartphone penetration grew 7% in 2016 to 81% - source) and technological advances which make mobile shopping easier that will lead the transition from e-commerce to mobile-commerce.

Despite the potential, one overwhelming factor has prevented this shift from happening sooner: the mobile shopping experience is still pretty terrible.

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