We have asked one of our Account managers, Kelvin Lewis, to tell us the mobile design
tips and tricks he passes on to his customers ahead of the busy Christmas period:

Hi, I’m Kelvin, an account manager here at Frooition. My role is to speak to prospective clients to work out how branding and design can help their online business as well as assisting existing customers to further improve their sales.

As an account manager I ‘m always looking for ways to help my customers improve their eBay and eCommerce experiences.

One of the hottest points for this year is Mobile commerce and mobile design. This affects both eBay and other channels such as eCommerce websites.

If you set your mobile design strategy correctly you can expect to benefit from extra traffic while maximising sales.

Why do you need to think about mobile design?

2013 saw 30% of all eBay sales being touched by mobile
Last year saw a 130% increase in mobile usage on eBay
Mobile design increases sales by 5%+ on eBay, more for eCommerce sites
Mobile optimized pages increase readability and decrease the time to make a purchasing decision
As mobile speeds increase (with the introduction of 4G) more and more people are using mobile devices instead of desktop computers

What do you need to think about with regards to mobile commerce and mobile design

Do your pages / listings actually work on mobile – if you use old technology such as flash then pages may not even display on mobile devices. Fixed width tables can lead to an awkward experience.
Is your content readable? If you use small fonts on a wide page then this leads the buyer to need to pinch and zoom to read the content which is an awkward experience, leads to important information being missed and detracts from sales.
Are your listings/pages slow? If your images are huge and not optimized they can take a long time to load on a broadband connection, this problem is much worse on slower mobile connections. If a listing takes too long then buyers assume it’s broken and go elsewhere.

Here at Frooition we are aware of the challenges of mobile commerce and have tailored our services to help sellers react to the changing world of eCommerce.

We have been working closely with eBay to create a brand new, mobile design listing template that adapts your listings to fit the buyer’s device. This creates a great shopping experience and increases sales.

We have also recently re-engineered our Bigcommerce eCommerce website services to offer responsive mobile designs that fit all devices.

All of our images are full optimized and we use super fast CDN hosting to ensure load times are as fast as possible without skimping on great looking design.

Obviously the easiest way to be mobile ready is to let Frooition help you by creating a mobile responsive design for your eBay and eCommerce sites.

If you would like to speak to me or one of my fellow experts the click here and we can arrange a call.

However for sellers who are not yet ready for a Frooition design there are a few simple tips you can follow:

Don’t use fixed widths for your design – use percentage widths so the whole page is 100%
Add CSS to images so the max width is 100% e.g.
<img src='IMAGEPATH' style='max-width:100%;'>
This way the image will not go off the page.
Optimize all of your images before you host them. Some great free sites that will optimize images are:https:/tinypng.com/and http://jpeg-optimizer.com/
Test your site speed. You want to aim for less that 3 second load times. A great tool I use is http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Don’t use flash or other legacy technologies
Use a font size of 14px or more.