How Your Mobile Checkout Form Factor Is Influencing Your Sales

By now, it should be no surprise that mCommerce is a growing and highly profitable source of revenue. You’ve heard buzzwords like User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) and have likely begun to recognize the impact they can have not only on your sales, but on the overall impression people have of your brand. When it comes to mobile, form factor takes on a whole new level of importance. When representing your company on such a small screen, you have a very limited amount of space to convey pertinent and appealing information that will ultimately lead to a successful conversion. That’s why UI is more important than ever when it comes to providing the best possible mobile checkout experience.

A few months ago, we created a new blog series: Checkout Showdown, to highlight the impact that UI can have on a shopping experience. We thought it was really important to take a critical look at what’s out there. And there’s no better way to challenge your brand to improve than by going to head to head against competitors. Take a peak at our two favorite checkout showdowns: Netflix vs Hulu and Walgreens vs CVS.

So how can you get a page that looks like these, and offers a streamlined checkout experience? There are a few key elements you’ll want to make sure you’re creating the best possible  design.

• Responsiveness. There’s nothing worse than opening a webpage on mobile that isn’t responsive to the screen size. Typing on a small screen is hard enough without having to scroll back and forth to find your place. If shoppers have placed items in a mobile shopping cart, make it as easy as possible for them to cross the finish line.
• Limit your fields. Only ask for the information you absolutely NEED. If you’re not going to ship a physical product to a customer, don’t ask for their address. A zip code to verify billing address is sufficient.
• Be in-app savvy. We’ll dive deeper into in-app best practices a bit later, but if you do go through the trouble of developing a mobile app, make sure it is easy to use.
• Return shopper sign in. If someone abandons a purchase and revisits your site, make it easy for them to checkout the second time. Or, if you have loyal customers who purchase from you frequently, they’ll want to be able to sign in and check out with ease.

So how can you offer the best experience on mobile? Luckily, you have options.

Hosted Checkout

If you work on a small team with limited resources, a hosted checkout page is likely your best best. With this option, BlueSnap would build the mobile optimized checkout page for you, and you can customize colors and branding.

Hosted Fields

We recommend this option. Integrating your site to our API, you’ll have more control over the look and feel of your page, and we can fully control the payments piece. Remember, your goal is to get someone to the final checkout screen as quickly and efficiently as possible. To this end, you’ll only want to include the most necessary fields like Cardholder name, number, and CVV for card payments. Here is an example of how to create a checkout using hosted fields.

And in case that’s not enough, learn how easy it is to enable hosted fields with this video on how to enable hosted fields with BlueSnap.

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