See if this sounds familiar. Visitors accessing your site via a mobile device have dramatically increased in the last two years. That increase got your attention. You developed a snappy, responsive site to make sure everything was “mobile friendly” and easy to use. And almost nobody’s buying anything on the mobile platform.

You’re not alone. U.S. Mobile conversion rates are stagnant at 1.5%. Compare that to the U.S. average desktop conversion rate of 4.5%

The number of customers shopping on mobile devices versus desktop is roughly equal, so why do desktop customers buy three times more often than mobile shoppers?

The answer, according to a growing number of voices in the on-line marketing community, is a flawed approach to mobile site design. The dominant design trend is to use Responsive Web Design (RWD). Google even prefers and recommends RWD. So far, so good.

The advantages of RWD is that it creates a single, easy to manage site, that displays your content on all devices – mobile, tablet, and desktop

The problem is, while RWD is cheap, easy and convenient to develop, it doesn’t necessarily result in a mobile website that easy to use. In other words, the site may be “device friendly”, but not necessarily “people friendly”.

This is because a responsive site is usually just a scaled version of your desktop site. Pictures and copy move around to make them mechanically fit on a much smaller mobile screen, but this overlooks the most important aspect - buyer behavior.

People who are browsing and shopping on a mobile device behave differently than on a desktop. Many mobile sites simply do not match the buying behavior of their customers. Doing so calls for tailoring a mobile site specifically for that purpose, not just scaling down a desktop site.

Delivering a people friendly mobile experience that carefully considers how customers want to buy is more work, but the result will be more sales.