It’s hard to think of a consumer who doesn’t use a mobile device in one way or another to make informed buying decisions. According to comScore, as many as 60 percent of Americans have now made the switch to web-enabled smartphone devices, giving the majority of Americans access to online stores at their finger tips.

Yet many retailers are sluggish to fully embrace mobile devices, despite the fact that they are playing an increasingly larger role as shopping companions. Customers are using their smartphones for everything from searching for store locations, checking and comparing prices, obtaining product information and shopping on the go, which is why it’s critical that merchants embrace this new technology with open arms.

Mobile Sites Versus Full Sites
Many retailers are actually taking big steps to improve the functionality of their mobile sites to better appease omnichannel shoppers. For example, mobile sites have shown a remarkable decrease in load times. Whereas a full site may take 7 seconds to load on a smartphone, mobile sites take only 4.33 seconds.

That’s still well above the recommended 1 second or less, but any improvement may help close the gap between how much time consumers spend on mobile retail and how much money consumers spend on mobile retail.

Accessing The Full Site Via Mobile
As many as 80 percent of companies have a mobile-specific website, which is a 4 percent jump from 76 percent last year. Although it is important to have an optimized mobile site (i.e. responsive design) or mobile app, retailers shouldn’t prevent smartphone users from navigating to the full site from a link on their smart phones. There are many activities that consumers can only access on a retailer’s full site. Radware reports that for most merchants, the majority of their mobile customers actually complete a transaction through the full site.

Barring full-site access from customers may negatively affect sales as it acts against the convenience mobile shopping is meant to provide. If someone cannot access the full-site from a smartphone to perform an activity that will influence their purchase, that person might never return when they have access from their laptop or desktop computer to complete the transaction. All in all, today’s consumer expects immediacy, consistency and convenience, whether he or she is shopping from a smartphone, tablet, computer, in-store, or even over the phone.