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Through massive technological evolution, we have become a nation of multi-screeners. We scroll through our Smartphones while watching the television. Sometimes, we watch a movie on a laptop while learning about it on the Smartphone. While shopping online, we tend to switch from one device to another to analyze the same product.
Google surveyed that 67% of online shoppers begin their journey on their Smartphone and complete it on a laptop. The device a user chooses to scroll on is driven by the context – place, action in mind, the time at hand, etc.
For instance, a middle-aged man looking forward to shopping for an engagement ring finds one of choice online while on the street. Data suggests he would head back home and complete the purchase from his laptop when in a comfortable position.
This multi-screen consumer behavior study by Google concluded that this is the norm. It has become imperative for e-commerce to revamp strategies that meet multi-screen needs.
In this digital era, an average multi-screener spends 4.4 hours on a screen. It includes retail-focused scrolling. During these 4 hours, they pass through several purchase points – junctures that trigger conversion.
It is pivotal for your e-commerce store to offer experiences that compel them to convert at these specific points.
The future of e-commerce lies in crafting multi-screen strategies to meet consumers' Omni-channel retail behavior.
In this blog, we will provide a comprehensive guide to establishing a multi-screen ecommerce development.
We will discuss future-proof strategies and the various dos and don'ts. We will cover the following topics as we go:
The goal of this blog is to ensure your e-commerce business successfully thrives on multiple technological devices.
Multi-screening refers to sequentially using two or more devices to perform similar or related tasks. It could mean a tablet and a Smartphone, or a laptop involved. In multi-screen e-commerce, users utilize multiple screens to analyze desirable products and make a purchase.
It is often almost not predictable, where the user is likely to end their shopping journey. However, Google’s consumer behavior study has concluded the following:
90% of online interactions are based on this, and the behavior has been termed convenience of choice.
This consumer behavior has made it crucial for e-commerce businesses to build multi-screen responsive stores. Owing to the present ecommerce dynamic – being only mobile-friendly, will not cut for digital success.
Sequential usage is the most common in e-commerce, and in the majority of cases starts with Smartphones.
The retail dynamic is evolving concerning multi-screen consumer behavior. With 268 million online shoppers in the United States, it is only rational for businesses to develop multi-screen e-commerce strategies.
The US e-commerce market is the second largest after China. The yearly retail sales are close to a trillion with a growth rate of 10%. During the pandemic, the market was tumultuous with a massive sales spike of 36%.
Currently, the market has settled, and the growth rate has normalized. It is expected to register a 14.7% CAGR by the year 2027.
Retail sales have been growing rapidly, and the present revenue is $925 billion (about $2,800 per person in the US)
Amazon is the most popular e-commerce site with $356 billion in e-commerce sales in 2022. The other market mammoths following Amazon are Walmart, Apple, eBay, Target, etc.
As we speak, the US retail market has a few challenges at hand – e-commerce security, targeted audience, customer loyalty, and conversions, to name a few.
Multi-screen e-commerce tackles digital consumers with a forward-thinking approach. It caters to multi-screeners in diverse ways. Whether a user is scrolling through deals on their Smartphone or completing the checkout on their laptop, it's all part of one seamless multi-screen adventure.
The multi-screen approach minimizes friction in the consumer journey, enhancing satisfaction and enabling brand loyalty. The responsive design inherent in multi-screen e-commerce strategy adapts to various screen sizes and resolutions.
The goal is to deliver a visually appealing and functional interface across devices. The adaptability streamlines the user experience and positions businesses as tech-savvy and attuned to the modern consumer.
The flexibility to browse and shop from different devices provides users with the freedom to interact with a brand on their terms. This adaptability extends beyond device type, encompassing multiple operating systems and browsers, ensuring a seamless experience for a diverse audience.
Implementation of a multi-screen e-commerce approach opens up avenues for expanded market penetration. Companies that have embraced this strategy effectively respond to changing consumer behaviors and preferences.
For instance, a brand may leverage social media platforms for mobile engagement, a dedicated app for personalized experiences, and a responsive desktop website for comprehensive product exploration.
With multi-screen, a business can be in all those places at once.
Big players like Amazon are nailing this game. They're everywhere - on the web, in apps, even in your voice assistant. It's all about being where the customers are.
The ideal goal of a multi-screen e-commerce strategy is to provide users the freedom of converting or completing a purchase in any technological medium. The content they interact with on your website must offer a similar experience when switching to a tablet.
Users engage most with a website when it is navigable, readable, and usable. No matter what device they are in, the brand offers the same user experience. To shoppers, this is a helpful feature that adds credibility and increases the chances of conversion.
Google reported that 61% of users are likely to abandon a website if they have trouble accessing it through mobile phones. 40% of them end up converting to a competitor website.
Hence, thriving in the multi-screen e-commerce era requires website designs to be responsive to multiple devices.
There are several features to get inspired from other such applications. For instance, Pinterest offers a highly responsive website and app experience. The pinning feature allows you to save useful content across mediums to access later – app, desktop app, or website.
(It is recommended to hire professionals when building a responsive e-commerce website design)
Cross-device compatibility and responsiveness go hand in hand in a multi-screen strategy. It ensures the website or app functions effectively across devices and browsers without compromising the UI and UX.
Cross-device compatibility also ensures a synced behavior. The user behavior is synced, and they can resume exactly where it stopped before the device switch.
Amazon effectively utilized this feature. Post searching for a product on the Amazon app and switching to a laptop, the website takes you back to searches through 'continue shopping', or 'last viewed’.
As aforementioned, daily media interactions begin on a Smartphone. These have the highest number of user interactions per day, and in a multi-screen environment, the first interaction juncture.
The app you provide to your users must be related to your e-commerce website. It must be informative and educate visitors about your brand and the products available. Like the website, the app must be responsive and thoroughly synced to the website for maximum user experience.
Optimized content design, including text, typography, and images, are essential components of a responsive e-commerce website or app. When trying to rule the e-commerce multi-screen market, the objective must be delivering an optimized experience.
Starting from right-sized images to adaptable content frames, all contribute to the user experience.
Flexible media is an essential component of content responsiveness. It makes images, content blocks, and other formats fluid. The size changes accordingly with the viewport of the website or app.
Another added feature to strengthen the multi-screen e-commerce strategy is offering complementary technology. This could be anything – from an email to a follow-up text. Several e-commerce retailers focus on collecting contact information from visitors for further engagement. It keeps an opportunity open for brands to reconnect with their potential customers.
The reason is simple – with so many screens and brands available, users completely forget their buyer journey. They do not run to competitors; they simply forget they were looking for such an item.
Complementary technology serves as a subtle reminder to these audiences and brings them back to the conversion path.
Importance of Analytics in Multi-Screen E-commerce Strategy – To ensure the above components have the desired result in the e-commerce strategy, it is important to leverage analytics and user-tracking. Analytics and tracking allow businesses to study how users interact with their websites. It 'to the point' delivers time frames – when a user drops using the website version and turns to the mobile device. It also indicates the engagement time on each device.
Accordingly, brands can implement strategies to elevate screen time and offer conversion possibilities across interaction junctures. Without analytics and tracking, planning is futile in e-commerce.
Since multi-screen e-commerce is no longer an 'add-on' but a necessity, let us quickly get into the various challenges the strategy is likely to face.
Although this high expectation can appear to be a potential problem, the solution lies within the components of multi-screen e-commerce.
Businesses must focus on offering a responsive design structure to their online presence across devices. They must enable customers to save their progress or some feature to resume the journey post-device switch.
The solution? Using complementary technologies and marketing tactics for customer retention. This could be reminding visitors of their shopping journey through text messaging or email.
Digital marketers will have to maintain consistency and connectivity to utilize marketing effectively. Even though this does not seem like a problem, the major issue lies in the marketing budget.
Performing multi-screen digital marketing would require a massive budget and may not be preferable for several businesses.
A simple solution would be focusing on SEO and content and prioritizing UGC until a healthy marketing budget is decided.
Several brands have faced these e-commerce challenges and brainstormed innovations. From advanced marketing to complimentary tech, they have utilized them all to break through the struggles. The goal is to learn from these e-commerce giants what the future of digital retail demands.
Staying updated about multi-screen trends and e-commerce practices is essential to stay ahead in the digital landscape in the coming years. To help brands like yours gear up for the upcoming year, we have listed some emerging trends to watch out for.
Collated with multi-screen features, these e-commerce trends will be game-changing in revenue and conversion –
If not implemented already, for retailers this is the next trend in line. Optimizing websites, apps, and other multi-screens with voice search means enhancing the platforms with conversational keywords.
Recent voice search statistics, claim voice search-enabled sales are to exceed $30 billion by 2024. Hence, prepping for voice search e-commerce is a smart move.
AR and VR together take user experience to the next level, and topping it over with multi-screen features makes brands high-converting.
By 2025, AR and VR will combine with multi-screen strategies to heighten e-commerce potential.
Netflix, for instance, has 1300 taste communities. Using AI and market research, the platform has segregated its audience into taste groups. It makes movie and TV show recommendations based on viewers' community tastes. This is what the future of machine learning looks like.
Just by the emergence of 4G, e-commerce developed an immersive shopping experience for the users. Imagine, what could 5G bring forth? By 2024, there will be uninterrupted e-commerce networks, smoother operations, and seamless logistics.
It is difficult for e-commerce brands to compete without the right innovation. Innovations are brought in to cater to the growing needs of consumers. Be it multi-screen e-commerce or multi-channel, the objective is to offer a positive shopping experience.
Now that you are surefooted about getting into multi-screen e-commerce development, allow us to guide you. The objective is to indulge a huge customer base across multiple forms of digital media. Here are two ways to ensure your e-commerce store is multi-screen friendly –
Let us break down each and understand how to achieve this to make your ecommerce business future-proof.
In simple words, responsive web design is adaptable to every device and displays the layout according to the screen size. Due to differences in screen dimensions, and sometimes bandwidth, websites look completely different across devices. This is acceptable, as long as users find the web presence navigable, content readable, and functions smooth.
The key components of a responsive website design are – fluid grids, flexible media, and CSS media queries. Fluid grids and flexible media ensure the layout adjusts to the screen size and the images and videos scale appropriately. The CSS media query is used to specify ‘breakpoints’ to create different CSS rules. These media queries are grouped logically for each device type.
Kindly note, that developing a responsive website is performed by professionals. It is advisable to hire one when developing a multi-screen e-commerce strategy.
This is mutually inclusive of responsive design. It detects the screen in use and informs the server. It helps provide different HTML for the same URL. Multiple HTML files are created for each screen size. One major downside of Dynamic Serving is it can be expensive and time-consuming.
There are several other actionable steps to maintaining a responsive and multi-screen-friendly website –
Trying to achieve all at once can be difficult in the e-commerce industry. This is a highly evolving domain and needs strategic planning, execution, and review under an agile setup.
The Agile Method requires breaking down one mammoth task into small achievable chunks. You will be performing the same tasks of developing, testing, and deploying, only in many stages.
The advantages of the agile method are many –
Even in a multi-screen e-commerce strategy, the agile method can easily get the word done with speed and flexibility.
Now that we have come to the end of this blog, let us jot down the key takeaways –
Hence, it is understandable that multi-screen is reshaping the retail industry and handing over the conversion control to the users. To succeed in the future shopping industry, multi-screen e-commerce development is the next objective in line.
At Webskitters Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd, we help you achieve newer levels of e-commerce development with our team of experts. Be it a multi-screen or AI-automated e-commerce approach, our years of expertise in the industry will help you reshape your online presence for the best.
Reach out to learn more about the best ecommerce strategies for 2024.
