Retailers Retool Sites to ease Mobile Shopping

Retailers who once envisioned a vast new market of mobile shoppers eagerly hitting “buy” on their cellphones have run headlong into a harsh reality: their customers are all thumbs. Even as phones get more versatile and sophisticated, many retailers’ mobile sites and apps make it difficult to shop. It can be hard to examine items on a small screen, and the pages are often slow to load. Perhaps most frustrating, the process of entering information on a mobile keyboard requires either surgical precision or very tiny fingers. As a result, retailers report that only about 2 percent of their sales are coming from mobile devices, a number well below the expectations of many e-commerce analysts.