Responsive Designing for e-Commerce Websites - What Are the Pros and Cons?

Responsive designing is an essential feedback to the requirement for the websites to offer internet users through multiple devices in a scalable and efficient way. But something that you should note is that responsive designing has been pretty slow with catching up with e-commerce, with only 3% of the companies listed in IR500 utilizing an effective responsive explication for their mobile visitors and 65% using mobile-intensive websites for server-side adaptive HTML. This trend is now ready to change as there are predictions to see more and more responsive e-commerce websites launching in the next few days. In the meanwhile, whether or not you should go responsive is something that you require evaluating. If you need the answer to this question, you first have to understand the advantages and disadvantages of having a responsive website for your e-commerce website.

As per a new research by Forrester Research Inc, e-retail sales in the US is all set to grow at a rate of 10% over the next few years, topping at $380 billion in 2017. This means that it is going to be a huge e-commerce industry. The biggest driver behind this growth would be mobile devices. There are estimates that the US retail mobile commerce sales will keep rising and will reach its zenith in 2020.

Responsive Designing for e-Commerce Websites �?�¢?? The Pros

The cumulative strength of One

Usually, responsive designing works with a single set of URLs and HTML codes. Instead of maintaining multiple codes like t.dot and m.dot on your desktop, any changes to the website needs to be done only once and the content can soon be operated via a single CMS. The process in turn simplifies the maintenance of the site and ensures that all users get access to content through any device. Sites created only for mobile needs redirects and this can only be neglected when marketing departments start creating different landing pages for different campaigns. This form of responsive designing ensures through email, display, search, social and other affiliate campaigns which all strike towards mobile-friendly webpages. With 30% of search clicks & 60% of email checking occuring through non-desktop mobile devices, the situation is really critical. Nevertheless, the CEO of Tech Supremo has recently opined that one of the biggest benefits of responsive designing is scalability.

Improved User Experience

Responsive websites can offer you a stellar experience as such websites can be created particularly for any mobile device use and the web designers aren�?�¢??t restrained to match the experience of desktop, they can redesign content, features and navigation according to their wish. Nevertheless, one thing to remember is that few of your devoted visitors might not realize the way of doing tasks that they�?�¢??ve learnt on their desktop when your mobile content and design are thoroughly disparate. For instance, the users who are famous with the website of Barnes and Noble�?�¢??s might not understand that their mobile website is designed only for search and not for navigation.

The Cons of Responsive Design for e-Commerce Website

Webpage Loading Speed

The biggest pitfall of responsive designing on user experience is the performance of the site. Mobile-specific sites can be easily brought down to bare bones HTML. Responsive websites tend to be slower as the browser of the user needs to load content from universal HTML file even when little content is hidden from the mobile users. Although responsive websites can be built from better mobile experience, you will also need additional scripts to add content to bigger screens.

Cost

Due to the complexity of responsive websites, it can cost you a lot of money and in most cases it does cost you huge. It is not as easy as crafting a Photoshop website and handing it over to a developer. Design and development should work together to make sure that the code work and layout work hand in hand at every breakpoint. It is ironical enough to note that the largest sites usually find responsive most expensive.

The change of process becomes easier

For most organizations, in order to go responsive, they have to go through process change and organizational change as well. Hence, the outsourced teams have to look for opportunities to work together and adapt to the changes.

Restraints in Designing

Websites which use advertising to capitalize can find it challenging to fit into ad units in responsive designing. Nevertheless, the ad industry is slowly catching up with different methods and methodologies.

Therefore, if you own an e-commerce website and you�?�¢??ve been wondering about whether or not to adopt yourself to responsive designing, you may take into account the above mentioned pros and cons. Although the cons outweigh the pros, yet you can give it a try in order to see which one suits better for enhanced user experience. However, make an informed and measured decision before opting for the change.