8 Reasons Why Mobile Doesn’t Convert, and How to Fix Them

8. Disruptive changes: It's likely that the biggest improvements in mobile commerce will come from new forms of shopping that leverage the unique strengths of mobile. For instance, Amazon.com's Fire phone features Firefly, an app that recognizes photos or names of products and lets the user instantly order them. Mobile shopping could in the future be a feature of the smartphone rather than a separate app or website that the user visits — i.e., the device becomes the store, rather than the device being used to access the store.

An Action Plan for Mobile Conversion
The mobile conversion problem can't be solved instantly. It's driven by a large number of small issues rather than one big thing that can be easily fixed. The only way to find all of those issues is to do careful user tests on your mobile app or site, in small batches, throughout the development process. That lets you find and fix problems before they get baked into the architecture. Although mobile is still a minority of commerce traffic, it's growing rapidly. Commerce companies that treat mobile as a second-class citizen are putting themselves at risk as the move to mobile accelerates.

Mike Mace is a mobile strategist at UserTesting, an online usability testing platform.