Mobile-First Design for Your eCommerce Platform

International eCommerce is usually going to depend extensively on mobile use and low bandwidth transmissions for certain regions. Because of this data limitation, we strongly encourage potential and existing clients who are working or planning on expanding to international venues, to really focus on mobile first as their primary concentration. The ideal situation involves starting with mobile in mind and expanding from there with further updates and developments on the international or global eCommerce presence.

One of the key components of international eCommerce in general is that end users need to be able to navigate through the application easily and quickly. If users have restricted bandwidth through their mobile carriers, or other forms of data plan limits in place, that constraint is going to pose a challenge for expansion and growth in their area. It naturally makes a lot of business sense to evaluate the different regions based on their monetary capability. But the last thing you want is an international eCommerce platform that's too bloated and overhead intensive, to the point it won't work effectively for a particular region.

We therefore encourage you to work with a partner who focuses on mobile as a primary capability and really understands the nuances of optimizing the related data transmission side of the application. There can be a tenfold improvement in site performance just from implementing certain basics, such as:

• Reducing the data to be transmitted across the wire
• Ensuring the settings are optimized for those data transmissions
• Leveraging best practices for content delivery network
• Providing overall optimization of images, script files, and timing of when they run, so that the landing page and all consecutive pages load swiftly

The combined deployment of the actions above is what ultimately yields a positive user experience for mobile.

Dangers of Not Accounting for Mobile User Friendliness with your Platform

One of the major downsides of not optimizing for performance and not embracing a mobile-first philosophy with international eCommerce is a low score and ranking by search engines. Typically, the international search engine results are quite cordoned off and commonly separated based on location. So if there's a search engine crawling the site and successfully identifies that it belongs to a particular international country or region, then the engine would likely compare against the other competitors in that given area as a kind of “preference” to compare against.

If your international eCommerce platform is very slow, heavily bloated, and underperforming, then search engines will determine that the end users will not prefer your site. As a result, search engines will not rank the site highly in their respective search results, making it harder for your audience to reach you through organic search. A large percentage of eCommerce purchases is currently completed on mobile and the number is steadily rising. Due to this fact, both the present and future health of your business can be strongly affected by the attention you give to mobile capabilities.

Many paid advertisers employ a similar policy with search engines, where they're not just basing their ad ranking score on the payment (bid) and how much funds the advertiser is willing to provide; they also take into account the overall performance and user satisfaction from a particular website. In other words, how well optimized a site is in the web arena and how probable it is to offer a satisfactory user experience. Consequently, It is critically important to think about, and validate, the capability of the site to run in a low bandwidth setting. This is something that we can thoroughly test and ensure as part of the detailed website audit process.

However, it can prove somewhat expensive to apply certain levels of optimization, depending on how the application itself is architected. For this reason, we encourage you to identify and work with an international eCommerce partner who has optimized their platform from the very beginning. If the capability is already included, you are empowered to dig deep into the weeds to enjoy an extremely high fidelity and payoff investment. If your international eCommerce software was poorly architected and will not support a mobile performance at scale, you’re facing an unsure or unclear investment with questionable returns.

Additional Considerations for Mobile Optimization of your Application

In addition, we also recommend a team validation of the user interface and the overall functionality, both for mobile and tablet versions. This is because when those portable devices are optimized around, typically the desktop version follows suit. There are copious amounts of unique optimization that can happen on desktop alone but most of the time, with a lot of the frameworks that are used for the user interface such as Bootstrap, it's really key to look at the different device types and screen dimensions. This helps to understand exactly how they are going to interpret the underlying code and present that for the end user. So not only are we looking at performance as a core criterion, but also just the overall experience with the user interface and how that displays in different regions or locales, compared to what users are expecting and are used to.

In a few rare cases, it can make sense to modify the user interface to match a locale or region. But what certainly tends to do well in all cases is identifying the primary language of the country that you are going to be working in, and which your targeted customers within that country prefer. The next step would be to validate and confirm that all the content is properly translating throughout those different installation mechanisms. The overall concept is all about focusing on mobile first, always considering the general mobile capability within a particular region with low bandwidth, and low capacity to increase it at will.

Clarity International eCommerce Experts

In the end, international eCommerce has a lot of complexities, but mobile is one of the vital requirements to implement correctly. Otherwise, many regions will be inevitably lost, and it won’t be because the international eCommerce platform you've brought to the market isn't better. It would rather be because on many occasions, those international users aren’t able to use the site efficiently due to the fact it wasn't well architected and executed. Our recommendation is to prevent such an outcome early on, by providing an excellent mobile user experience on your international eCommerce platform.

The clarity team welcomes you to reach out to our friendly and knowledgeable staff to set up a complimentary review of your upcoming international eCommerce project at your discretion. You will have the opportunity to discuss mobile performance and other practical optimizations with our team of experts. In the meantime, feel free to click the following links and discover more related information in regard to international eCommerce. In case you’d like further elaboration on any topic you can’t find below, we encourage you to click the Ask the Experts button and one of our specialists will provide a detailed response. We may also genericize the response and add it on our website to benefit future visitors as well.