4 Best Tools to Make Your Magento Web Store Mobile-Friendly
“Mobile responsiveness” is all the rage these days among web site creators. No matter how much time and efforts you’re spending on designing a great online presence, if it’s not optimized for mobile devices, you’re going to lose a large portion of your website traffic. Nowadays, having a mobile-friendly site has become a necessity, as it can help in grabbing the attention of your targeted customers.
So, if you’re thinking of creating an e-commerce site or already have a Magento online store, make sure that it is mobile-ready or you won’t be able to drive traffic to the site. Perhaps, you may think of transforming your current Magento store design to a responsive web design (RWD), so as to make your web store mobile-friendly. But, you might still not be able to perform the same task because lack of coding skills and knowledge needed to create a mobile version of your store.
Thankfully, there are tools available online that can be used to add mobile-friendly features in your existing Magento powered store. In this post, I’ll cover some of the most useful tools ideal for making your Magento e-store mobile-friendly. But, before that, let’s look at the major reasons behind the growing significance and necessity of a responsive web design.
Why Your Web Store Needs a Responsive Design
There are two main reasons that have made responsive design a necessity than just a passing trend, such as:
“Mobile will hold the reins in future”
As the mobile device usage is sky-rocketing, it has become a lot more important for online retailers to design a store that works well on all the mobile devices. Besides, according to stats, over 48 percent of Google searches are done using mobile devices.
Furthermore, based on the data provided by Nielsen in relation to mobile media: 89 percent of consumers time is spent on mobile. All these factors, clearly suggest that the mobile usage is only going to increase in the near future. And so, having a responsive store will ensure that it looks and functions well regardless of the device – it is being viewed on.
Google recommends use of RWD
As you may know, recently Google rolled out its “mobile-friendly” update, according to which mobile-friendliness will be using a ranking signal. This means that a more mobile-friendly site will attain a good rank on the Google search engine. Along with the update, Google also introduced ways to test how friendly a website is for mobile devices, and tips on optimizing it for mobile. And, the search engine giant recommended using responsive web design.
Tools to Turn Your Magento Web Store Mobile Friendly
If you want to save yourself from going through the hassle of creating a mobile optimized Magento web store from the ground up, then CouchCommerce is the perfect tool for you. A popular Magento extension, CouchCommerce flawlessly converts the desktop version of a Magento website into a mobile optimized one, using its web app technology. What’s more, it makes use of the open-source “Sofa SDK” technology, giving you the ability to accomplish best touch-optimized web store along with several benefits like: 3rd party integrations, offline functionality, continuous updates and a lot more. Though, this tool doesn’t provide a free trail, but it’s pricing plan is quite reasonable: monthly fee starts at 3000 euros.
Adding discounts, seasonal sales offers and shipping options in a Magento web store can help you bring in good traffic to your store. In fact, most of the Magento stores come integrated with such options, which helps deliver a great user experience. However, you can augment your shipping options even more using Magento’s multi-flat rate shipping extension. It will give your customers the ability to customize their purchase, by creating multiple flat rate, per item shipping charges, etc.
A mobile shopping platform, Mobify easily integrates into your existing Magento web store without affecting your marketing software. Once integrated, this tool makes use of user management tools to extend the capabilities of your e-store to mobile optimized solutions such as web app that can adapt and adjusts to fit smartphones and tablets. It even embeds mobile device capabilities into your web store like NFC, touch security, payments and more. Helping you to create optimal shopping experiences across mobile devices, Mobify is the perfect tool that can help you leverage the power of mobile touchpoints.
Adding the “Live Chat” support in your Magento web store can help you address your customer queries (if any) regarding your store in real-time, which increases customer satisfaction. In fact, according to a study carried out by Forrester Research revealed that: “44 percent of online consumers want to have their questions answered by a person when they’re in the middle of a purchase”. Magento live chat is a great plugin that when installed to a Magento store will enable your customers to chat with your e-store sales person in a highly reliable and secure manner.
Conclusion
As mobile usage is growing continuously, it can be foreseen that the mobile will rule the web world. And thus, you should be prepared with a sustainable online presence that could help you cope up with the growing mobile consumers’ needs. If you’re running a Magento powered store, and want to make it optimized for mobile devices, then using the aforementioned tools will help you build a worthwhile mobile brand.
Author Bio: Tyler holt is a blogger & Magento developer. He loves writing articles describing the importance of Magento e-commerce platform and latest development activities. Currently, he is employed with Magentax Ltd. a Magento Web Development Servicesthat has been remarkable in delivering high-quality Magento websites and e-stores.
