Here at Web Consultancy we like to take our own experiences as a learning opportunity and use our newly-gained knowledge to the benefit of our clients. We had a golden example of this recently, which shows just how valuable it is to ensure every aspect of your web presence is responsive and mobile friendly.
We pride ourselves on being available for our clients when they need us, so it was no surprise to one of our team to get a call on a Saturday afternoon. What was surprising, however, was that the customer was very keen to pay for a service then and there. To fulfil this request and process the payment, our team member needed to log in to our payments system of choice on his smartphone.
It was at this point that we learned our payments system – one of the most trusted and highly regarded services available – had not updated their site to be responsive and mobile friendly. Despite our team member using one of the latest smartphones on the market, it proved tricky and time consuming to enter card and payment details onto a standard website.
We learned something of great value from the frustration of processing this payment (which we did, eventually). A successful ecommerce website doesn’t just need to be pretty to look at, it also has to be user friendly. This means that it needs to be responsive and optimised for the wide array of mobile devices many of us use to access the internet.
Google, easily the biggest search engine and the most visited website in the world, appreciated early on that responsive sites would offer a better user experience. As a consequence, they have been rewarding responsive sites with a higher search return ranking. The ecommerce section of sites, where people select items or services to buy and process their payment, must be as adaptive as the rest of the site.
As you’d expect, we’ll soon be having a chat with our payments service provider about the fact that their system doesn’t work well on mobile devices. We would encourage you to talk to us about making sure the same thing doesn’t happen to your site. Our team are capable of making the majority of existing websites out there responsive and mobile friendly. Of course, we can also create brand new ones designed to do this from the start.
If you have an ecommerce system which is cumbersome and difficult to use, your potential clients are likely to simply search for a competitor that has simplified the process. Don’t let this happen to your business.