It’s no secret that mobile webpages are the present and future of online marketing and e-commerce. But reality is, no platform is perfect upon launch, causing the migration of e-commerce to mobile to pose some challenges. The rise of mobile is undeniable, and as more users turn to their mobile devices to shop, only to arrive at bug-laden platforms, many retailers have been struggling with early bounce rates. That’s why, despite the fact that nearly 60% of traffic comes from mobile users, mobile conversions are still only a fraction of what we see come from desktops.
Low mobile conversions can likely be attributed to poor mobile web design. If your site doesn’t look good or function properly, users will not be inclined to take action, let alone stay on the site. A good user experience is critical to closing a sale, which means that you need more than just a great product to gain conversions. This is where AMP comes in.
By using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to perfect the user experience your site delivers to potential customers, you can easily change your mobile bounces into conversions. Keep reading to learn more about how to get started with AMP in your mobile web design.
Google AMP and E-commerce
Now, you may be wondering how AMP is beneficial to e-commerce and online retailers. When it was first released, AMP was created for faster publishing of static content like articles and blogs. However, the main benefits of AMP and new developments make this new web development and design platform now just as useful for e-commerce.
Put simply, AMP works mostly to reduce load times on mobile devices which is crucial for e-commerce since mobile user experience is innately tied to load times. If a mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load, 53% of visitors will abandon that pages, but a whopping 77% of mobile sites take over 10 seconds to load on data networks. As you can see, the difference of just a few seconds can cause a lot of damage to your conversion rates.
Beyond speed, there are also a variety of pre-built and easy to use AMP features that can drastically improve user experience for online retailers. We’ll go over what exactly these features are and how to implement them in the next section.
How To Implement Google AMP for E-commerce
Now that you know the basics of how AMP web design works for e-commerce, we can move on to how to implement to benefit mobile conversion rates. Below we’ll outline how you can use AMP features to optimize your mobile pages for a better user experience and up your online sales.
Before you jump in, it’s important to know that it’s not necessary to to convert your entire site to AMP at once. Instead, it’s recommended that you analyze your site and implement AMP where it makes sense to by identifying the goal and key features of each page type. With this in mind, here’s three ways you can implement AMP web design to increase your mobile conversions.
- Browsing
Good pages to convert to AMP first would be browsing pages. Many users will start their journey from a site’s homepage or a product category pages, both greatly suited for AMP as the content here is typically static and aimed towards showcasing the best available products. Features like the carousel component, <amp-carousel>, are an easy way to optimize product browsing for mobile experience.
- Product Pages
If a browsing page is successful, the next stop for most users is a product page. On these pages, you can use the <amp-carousel> and <amp-video> elements to add bold hero images and videos to create an interactive and attractive page to showcase your product. You can also add more detailed sections or extended descriptions with the <amp-accordian> tag.
Two other useful tags for product pages are the <amp-social-share tag> and the <amp-sidebar> tag. An important part of e-commerce is social sharing which can increase traffic to your site. Using the <amp-social-share> elements, you can enable users to share the product link with friends and family.
Navigation is another crucial aspect for not only product pages by user experience in general. Easy to use navigation makes it easy for users to search the rest of your site if they change their mind or want to browse further. Using the <amp-sidebar> element allows you to implement a navigation menu across all pages, making it easy for users to explore other areas of the site. This leads us to our next section: exploring related products.
- Exploring Related Products
As mentioned, users will often change their mind. Sometimes the initial product they’re after isn’t the one they want, or they’ll want to explore their options in similar products.
To do this, you could simply create a static list of similar products, or you could also use the <amp-list> element to generate a list for you. This creates a more personalized experience for the user since the content is created dynamically server-side for each request.
Making it easy for users to explore related products will easily increase conversions as it encourages users to view more of your products and also offers them more information through your site, encouraging them to stay with your rather than bounce to a competitor’s page.