On her daughter’s birthday, a friend and her family went to a pizza house to celebrate. One of the crew members offered her a free rewards card that would also shave 10% off their total purchase. Not one to shy away from a bargain, she accepted the offer. A penny saved is a penny earned, after all.
Eager to try if the card’s “buy one, take one” promo for deliveries worked, she whipped out her mobile phone the moment they all got home and navigated to the pizza house’s web address. She got there alright. So far, so good.
But when it came time to place an order, the page on her smartphone’s screen went all wonky. For some reason, the box where she needed to input her card number wouldn’t stay put, stubbornly insinuating itself on the lower half of the screen no matter what she does, making it impossible to even type in anything.
After several futile attempts, she gave up in frustration. The pizza house’s website was clearly not mobile-friendly, resulting in an order gone forever and possibly still a seething customer.
The continually growing clout of mobile
Mobile usage is on the rise, and you need not be a statistician, data analyst, or some number prodigy to figure that out. Literally everywhere one goes these days – in restaurants, on the train, at the waiting room in the doctor’s office, inside a bus, at work – are people tinkering with the apps on their smartphones, swiping here and there, texting, calling, listening to music, watching movies, videoconferencing, checking their bank balances, shopping online, zapping zombies, or catching whatever is the latest thing that needs catching.
In fact, the growing prevalence of online shopping through smartphones has now been dubbed “m-commerce” and is seen to potentially “become a major channel for shopping,” if only the mobile shopping experience isn’t such a nightmare, according to a Business Insider article.
Case in point is our botched pizza online shopping example above.
Statistics to make the case for a mobile-friendly website
Interestingly, despite the glaring ubiquity of handheld devices and the mobile internet, many companies fail to keep their websites mobile-friendly – 23% of small businesses with a website, according to a 2016 Clutch.co survey.
As such, we’ve compiled statistics that will, perhaps, convince you that a site’s mobile-friendliness isn’t something to continuously push to the back burner:
- 75% of internet use in 2017 will be mobile. [Source: Reuters citing a Zenith report, 2016]
- Global mobile wallet spend is projected to rise to $1.35 trillion, an increase of approximately 32%, in 2017. [ATM Marketplace citing a Juniper Research, 2017]
- Internet usage on mobile devices was 51.3% in October 2016 compared to 48.7% on desktops. [Source: StatCounter Global Stats, 2016]
- 61% of Google users are unlikely to return to a website they had difficulty accessing on mobile, and 40% will instead go to a competitor site. [Source: McKinsey & Company, 2014]
- 57% of users won’t bother recommending a mobile site that’s poorly designed. [Source: CMS Report, 2015]
- Approximately 80% of mobile users have performed shopping-related activities on their devices. [Source: Social Media Today, 2014]
- Mobile usage now fuels all digital growth, with mobile representing 65% of total digital media time. [Source: Marketing Land citing a comScore report, 2016]
- According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, 429 million mobile connections and devices were added in 2016. [Source: Cisco, 2017]
- 4 billion smartphones were sold in 2015, an increase of 14% year-over-year. [Source: App Annie citing a Gartner report, 2016]
- In 2016, 43.6% of all website traffic around the world came from mobile phones, up from the previous year’s 35.1%. [Source: Statista]
Bonus:
- 48% of millennials watch videos solely on their mobile devices. [Animoto, 2015]
- Mobile represents 55% of all email opens, while desktop and webmail split the remaining share at 19% and 26% respectively. [Source: eMail Monday citing a 2016 Litmus report]
Final word
Whether you like it or not, the coming days, months, and years will see an increasing surge in mobile internet usage, not just to find information online but also for shopping. As such, don’t be that business with a site people won’t bother revisiting just because you’ve forgotten to make it suitable for mobile browsing or purchasing.
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