To give you a head start on mobile commerce and how to best offer this to your consumers, we have collected some of our best practices.

Mobile First from Start to Finish

Ensure you have optimized your website for mobile devices, while keeping the same functionality offered on the desktop version of your website. For example: if the shopping cart on your desktop is on the top right hand, put it there as well on your mobile device.

Having said that, be sure you start designing with the full mobile screen in mind first. Do not degrade your desktop version, but rather upgrade your mobile version. You might want to think twice by filling the full screen of the mobile device with one big banner. Give your consumers the possibility to navigate through your site, without having to scroll too much.

Remember: mobile is not ‘just’ a smaller screen than a desktop. It is completely different. Your consumers will probably not be sitting straight up, watching their desktop or laptop. They might be sitting in the bus, on the couch or lying in bed. They most likely will use one finger to navigate and enter data. Your banners should be simple and easily readable on a mobile screen. What works on desktop, will most likely not work on a mobile device.

The size of your buttons do matter. Try to enter data yourself. How often do you press on the right place and how often do you realize you have to zoom in so you can press the right button?

Think about loading times. Loading a page on a laptop or desktop can be done, while watching another site. On mobile, you will keep watching your screen till the page appears. The longer it takes to load, the more likely it is your consumer will leave your page. So ensure it loads within seconds, even if you are on 3G or a slow Wi-Fi connection during your holiday.

Mobile Optimized Payment Products

Make the payment itself as easy as possible for your consumers. Of course you offer your consumers the payment products they are familiar with, but also offer them the payment products that are optimized for mobile. You don’t want to lose your customer in the final stage of the process. For each of our payment products you can see whether it is optimized for mobile or not. The key thing is to balance between the most favorite payment products in a country and the mobile optimization for it. Some products which do work fine on a desktop, might not be preferred on a mobile, as the data entry for a consumer should be reduced to a minimum if they have to type with one finger.

Reduce Friction

Make it as easy as possible for your consumer to pay, by reducing the number of fields they have to fill in. On a desktop it is easy to enter your address and 16 digits of your credit card; on a mobile device you will get most likely autocorrected for your street and have to verify twice whether you entered the correct card number.

Offer a guest checkout, so your consumers are not obliged to create another account. If they enjoyed to shop in your store, chances are they will return to your site and decide to spend the additional time to create their own account.

Our APIs allow you to tokenize transactions. Please refer to our API documentation for further guidance.

Security

For your customers it is key that they can trust the page on which they fill in their payment details. That is why we added the text ‘secure payment’ in green letters to our MyCheckout hosted payment pages. We do offer secure payments by the security mechanisms implemented, as well as our SSL Certificates, but we also want to stress it to your customers.