Charity bracelet ecommerce retailer Bravelets recently saw a 48 percent decrease in customers abandoning its mobile platform to finalize purchases on desktop after streamlining the checkout process for smartphones.

Bravelets now sees 80 percent of ad impressions on mobile after having cleaned up the checkout process to make it less cumbersome. After data revealed that customers were leaving mobile to finish purchasing on desktop, the brand worked at keeping those customers within the mobile platform to drive sales and impulse purchases.

“Through the course of last year, Bravelets invested in optimizing its mobile checkout experience in order to increase conversions on mobile and keep the traffic they worked so hard to acquire,” said Scott Briggs, founding managing partner and president at OrionCKB. “Since the beginning of the year, they have seen 80 percent of impressions coming from mobile, and of those, 18 percent of checkouts are happening on desktop, which is significantly lower from 2015’s number of 66 percent.

“The mobile experience has improved, so, instead of a shopper waiting and coming back on desktop, users were more likely to convert while on the same device the impression started,” he said.

Braving mobile checkout
While many Bravelets customers were coming to its mobile site to browse products and learn information, many were leaving and finishing checkout on its desktop platform. In fact, 66 percent of mobile users were going to desktop to check out.

Bravelets worked with OrionCKB to clean up the checkout process, which through data and research, the brand realized was too complicated. Users had to go through various steps in order to completely check out, which prompted many users to try again and most likely lost many shoppers.

The smaller screens on mobile devices mean that consumers have less patience for cumbersome user experiences. The checkout process was not completely optimized for mobile, but after it was streamlined with an interface created specifically for mobile, the brand saw a big uptick in mobile sales.

Mobile marketing sales
The marketer is leveraging data to determine how to best target consumers, and since the positive results with mobile optimization, Bravelets is focusing on more mobile moments. The bracelet manufacturer is spending 125 percent more on mobile pushes than desktop, and will be experimenting with driving sales through mobile video and carousel ads.

“These numbers have led to a spend increase in mobile ad dollars – in fact, they are spending 125 percent more on mobile than desktop this year,” Mr. Briggs said. “The other thing that has helped this client realize such success on mobile is their willingness to take risks and act on the data that’s coming back.

“For example, they saw the opportunity to keep people on mobile, so they worked on fixing that,” he said. “This year, they tested video ads and now those are performing better than link or carousels ever did for direct response.

“When the next big thing happens, no doubt they will have spent some money figuring out if that works, too.”