Monday 8 October 2012

What 4G means for your ecommerce store

With cities up and down the country rolling out new 4G capabilities within the next few months, what will this  new high-speed data service mean for your online store?

4G will allow mobile devices to have download capabilities up to 100 megabytes per second, that's more than double the speed on current 3G mobile devices. This means that in terms of your ecommerce store, mobile commerce has never been more important. This significantly increased download speed will mean that your online store will load on smartphones much quicker, resulting in customers being able to carry out their shopping experience faster than ever. Not only will this make customers happier, it will also result in you being able to take more orders over a shorter period of time.

However, looking at 4G as simply a way of allowing your current ecommerce store to load quicker on mobile devices is limiting it's true capabilities. Rather than looking at what it can do for your current mobile store, you should be looking at how it can help you have a more advanced mobile store. Currently, a number of mobile stores are limited on the amount of data they can have. The bigger your store in terms of data, the longer it is going to take to load on a mobile device. 

This drastically increased speed that 4G provides means that a mobile store on a 4G network can hold much more data and still load quicker than your current 3G store. For this reason, you should be looking at what you can do to in terms of making your store more appealing to your customers visiting through mobile devices. This could consist of having more detailed designs in terms of layout and buttons, having more images to entice customers to purchase your items, insert videos or having a complete overhaul, creating a new, more efficient mobile store from scratch. 

Another benefit comes in not only the ability for a customer to view your store's pages quicker, but also find your store quicker through other methods. If a customer is using a mobile app to find the cheapest price for a product they are looking for, they will either use the app itself or the search engine capability on their smartphone to trawl through a number of different ecommerce stores looking for the best deal. On the current 3G data service, due to some sites loading slower than others, a customer may grow tired of the process after searching through four or five different online stores. What this means is that if your store is low down in terms of search engine ranking, the likelihood is that they won't come across your site. Increased speed through 4G capabilities means customers will be able to go through more online stores at a quicker rate, greatly increasing the chances of a customer actually coming across your ecommerce store during their search.

However, even with the 4G data service, if your store is on say page 10 of Google, no matter how quickly a page loads, a customer just isn't going to spend the time searching through all the preceding pages until they come across yours. For this reason, you need to look at your store's SEO as well as your mobile store capabilities. For help on improving your online store's search engine ranking, check out: 'New businesses guide to SEO success

If you have yet to set up your own mobile store or are looking to upgrade your current model, you can sign up with eSellution and get a free mobile store in time for the 4G boom. 

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