Author: Dan Gendro

Apple has introduced buy buttons in its digital store

Apple has made a change to its online store in order to foster growth in mobile shopping. For several years, Apple has kept product information separate from commerce. Those interested in purchasing products, such as an iPhone, would have to visit a different website, which served as Apple’s digital store. Now, however, Apple has introduced “buy” buttons, which will make e-commerce more streamlined and give Apple a way to provide convenient services to consumers.

Change will be more accommodating of mobile consumers with smartphones and tablets

The change comes as Apple becomes more aware that consumers want to explore, research, and shop for products in one place. Having to visit multiple different sites when trying to purchase and research products is seen as inconvenient, so Apple unified the process by including a buy button that will allow shoppers to make a purchase quickly. Streamlining the process could help Apple establish a stronger foothold in the e-commerce space, especially as the company continues to expand into the world of mobile payments.

Apple remains slow when updating its e-commerce store

Apple has been quite slow in redesigning its e-commerce platforms. The company’s digital store is one of the most frequently visited websites in the world, and a significant amount of this traffic comes from mobile shoppers. Despite, this, the company has seen little need to make any significant changes to the website, even when it debuted the Apple Watch, which was only available online.

Updated store will be more convenient for mobile consumers than its previous iteration as Apple begins to focus more on mobile payments

One of the reasons Apple has made a change to its online store is because it was not optimized for mobile viewing. This made it difficult for mobile consumers to use the store and purchase products that they found interesting. Now, the store is more capable of handling a mobile audience and Apple is likely to continue making adjustments to its approach on e-commerce in order to accommodate those using smartphones and tablets to shop online.

The internet has already altered the car shopping experience and smartphones have gone a step further.

A recent study conducted by Autoshopper has revealed that more than one in every three people who use the internet to shop for vehicles such as cars, SUVs and trucks, have conducted a mobile search on a smartphone or tablet while actually standing in a dealership.

That represents an increase of a massive 29 percent over the number of people who were doing it in 2013.

Considering the trend toward mobile search, that really doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, earlier in 2015, searches over smartphones and tablets surpassed those that took place over PCs, according to statistics released by Google. It was that trend that brought about the massive wave nicknamed “mobilegeddon” in which Google – and then later, Bing – changed their algorithms in order to favor websites that were mobile friendly, when a search was conducted over mobile devices.

Now, dealerships are paying close attention to mobile search, as it is having a considerable impact on sales.

Since Google results now favor mobile friendly websites, dealerships have discovered that if they want to be able to stand out to their customers, then this is the type of experience that they are going to have to provide. After all, the last thing that they want to do is have a potential customer standing on their showroom floor while discovering the offerings of a competitor on their smartphones because that rival had a mobile friendly website and therefore received better search results.

Of course, the experience goes far beyond search. As dealerships battle over customers, they are now trying to create a far more seamless experience between the device and shopping in person, so that the two will work together.

Not only are most dealership websites already highly optimized for mobile search, they are also designed to provide a much broader experience that will allow consumers to be able to view additional resources that will help them to make their decisions and to learn what they want to know about the vehicles that they are considering.