The Most Annoying Things in Mobile Online Shops

With the amount of time we spend on mobile devices, there are bound to be one or two annoying things on the internet. With this understatement of the year in mind, mobile internet usage continues to increase every day. Not only is the time spent per day on mobile devices going up, but mobile shopping has finally overtaken desktop's share of online shopping.

With mobile shopping owning the majority of e-commerce sales, it's super important that your online shop be mobile-responsive (aka mobile-friendly). Although you may be confident in your online shop, let's have a look at some of the basic elements you should keep an eye on so it doesn't annoy your shop's visitors and lose you potential sales.

Display Advertising

Study after study has shown that bad advertising can really ruin an online experience, especially when shopping. It consistently ends up in the top 5 answers of annoying things in mobile experiences.

We all accept advertising as part of our daily lives, but when ads become overly aggressive and straight-up annoying, they can have the opposite effect as their intention. Although a well-placed pop-up can actually be really effective, overdoing it can cost you...

Ever since Google began penalising any mobile sites displaying pop-up ads with the intrusive mobile interstitial penalty, you should do without these pop-ups in your (mobile) online shop. With mobile pop-ups, you’ll be providing a poor user experience and can lose rankings in organic results.

Difficult-to-click buttons

Another common annoyance in mobile shops is difficult-to-click buttons.

Google has created a guideline filled with recommendations to make your site more “mobile-friendly”. It mentions that touch elements, like buttons or navigation links, for example, should not be too close to one another so that the user doesn’t accidentally touch one element instead of the one they meant to.

Remember, it can't be form over function when it comes to mobile user experiences. Ideally, you're site looks aesthetically pleasing while also being functional and easy to use.

To find out if these elements are working flawlessly on your website, you can try out the Mobile-Friendly Test. For example, with Android, a minimum size of approximately 7mm or 48 CSS pixels for links and buttons is specified.

Users shouldn’t have to zoom in and out of the page for easy tapping on the desired buttons and links. Here, according to the Mobile-Friendly Guidelines, you should have roughly 5mm or 32 CSS pixel spacing between the buttons.

Source: shutterstock.com/diy13

Unclear navigation

Chaotic navigation is another common gripe among online shoppers. Website navigation should be as clear and slim as possible, even on desktop websites. The so-called “fly-out” navigations help the fewest users with orientation.

Mobile devices offer even less space for navigation. Therefore, the following points should be considered for mobile navigation:

the navigation should be easily found
it should be filled with clear terms/categories
slim with no more than 7 navigation points
consistent on all pages
easy to use (size and distance of buttons for good “clickability”)

Unresponsive design

Google has been pushing mobile-friendliness for quite a few years. They finally put their money where their mouth is by publicly stating that having a mobile-friendly site is an important ranking factor and finalising it in March 2021.

Although there are different approaches for making your website easy to use on mobile devices, Google recommends mobile-responsive designs. Google indexes and ranks your content that comes directly from the mobile version of your site, so one way or another, your site needs to look good (and feel good) on mobile devices.

Pictures can’t be enlarged

The fact that some photos can’t be enlarged or zoomed into disrupts the user experience. Frequently, the zoom function on mobile websites is deactivated. One possibility is to offer the enlargement function of the images via a lightbox.

One way or another, consumers need to see your products up close, so make your images easy to click on. And while you're at it, make sure there are plenty of photos. The more the merrier.

Mobile shops that offer less information than the desktop store

In order to make a mobile site cleaner and clearer, a common practice in the past was to remove some of the mobile content that is available on desktop versions.

This has a two-fold negative effect. First of all, you might get dissatisfied customers. Secondly, this might lead to SEO problems.

As Google has shifted to the mobile-first indexing policy mentioned ealier, you can't use a stripped down version of your website anymore. These days, your mobile site should be as functional and informative as the desktop version of the site.

Long loading times

A website simply doesn’t load – this is also a major frustration. You can test possible problems with your site with Google Pagespeed Insights and get tips to solve problems. Some of the most frequent suggestions here are:

Eliminate JavaScript and CSS resources that block rendering
Use of browser caching
Image Optimisation (Formatting & Compression)
Reduce HTML

Conclusion

Mobile responsiveness and mobile-friendliness have become more important than ever for online shoppers, and thus, for shop owners. Make sure your e-commerce business runs on mobile in a clear, easy way and you'll be set up to rank higher in Google.