Is your eCommerce store mobile friendly?

Mobile continues to play an increasingly important part in eCommerce success. According to Statista forecasts, retail sales from mobile eCommerce (mCommerce) in the UK are expected to exceed £100 billion by 2025, aligning with the widespread use of mobile devices.

Customers use their mobiles to investigate purchasing decisions before making purchases in-store or on a desktop, in addition to completing the entire buying journey on their mobile devices. In 2023, nearly all individuals aged 16 to 54 in the UK owned a smartphone, and mobile appears to be the preferred channel for online shopping in the country.

Customers’ comfort with mobile buying is ever-increasing, and as a result, the industry cannot disregard mobile’s importance in the eCommerce market when it comes to the design and user experience of their websites. Integrating data verification software, such as address verification, can also help create the experiences that keep customers coming back.

Mobile sites vs responsive sites

You’ve probably seen the “m.website.com” domain before; it denotes a separate mobile website. That means the mobile version of your site is hosted on a different domain from the desktop version. Mobile websites are distinct from the desktop version of your website since they are developed exclusively for mobile devices.

Responsive sites are much more inclusive for the modern-day user. Responsive websites can detect the type of device a visitor is using and automatically alter the layout of the content to fit the user’s screen size.

Separate mobile sites can be more difficult to manage than responsive sites. Any updates to a single URL in responsive sites are made to that site rather than having to go in and update two distinct sites. Most crucially, a responsive site’s functionality and content are consistent across all versions. There will be no more debates over which features are best for desktop and which are best for mobile. The look and feel of the site will be consistent across the board.

If the website is consistent for mobile users, they’ll be able to access all products and services wherever they are, which in turn makes your business completely accessible. Additionally, implementing address lookup software can enhance the user experience you deliver to your customers.

Tips to make your website more mobile-friendly

Website speed

According to research, 53% of customers will abandon a mobile site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. You can do a few things to discourage the majority of those visitors from abandoning your site due to latency.

Above-the-fold components can be served while elements farther down the page are loaded in the background. This is known as lazy loading, and it’s a frequent method for hiding the true loading time.

However, when it comes to using lazy loading to hide latency, be mindful. Google warns that if you use lazy loading on your mobile site incorrectly, it may prohibit Google from crawling your content. So make sure you do your homework and get it right.

You can also serve smaller-sized images for mobile pages. Techniques such as srcset (which defines a set of images for the browser to choose between, and what size each image is) make it possible to display larger images on desktops while serving smaller versions of the same images on mobile devices. Because you’re offering a smaller total page, you can use this to your advantage to reduce the loading time on mobile devices.

Moreover, integrating address lookup software can streamline the user experience by reducing keystrokes by 90%.

Minimise forms and make use of address verification

The more effort required to complete a form, the less likely users are to complete it. That’s why the first guideline of form design is to make it as short as possible and eliminate all non-essential fields.

An address lookup software can make the mobile checkout process so much quicker and easier. Instead of filling in up to 6 individual fields, the customer just begins typing their address (from any point, whether they start with the town or the street number doesn’t matter) and the type-ahead address verification makes suggestions from the first character. Once the correct address has been located using the address finder software, the customer simply needs to select it, and the entire address form will be automatically populated with validated information.

Optional fields

Consider whether you truly need to add optional fields in your form. Determine what data you truly require rather than what you want. In a perfect world, your form would have no optional fields. By minimizing the information required from customers, especially with the aid of address finder software, you not only enhance their experience by expediting the process but also increase the likelihood of their return.

Optimise your mobile eCommerce with address lookup

After browsing the above knowledge to optimise your mobile experience, you should consider the many benefits of an address verification or postcode lookup software. The main benefit of using a mobile device is that it’s already right in front of you, whether you’re at home or on the commute to work.

Giving customers the ability to enter their full, correct, validated address with just a few keystrokes is the perfect finish to the convenient ease of a mobile commerce experience. It is the quick-fire tool your business needs to increase conversion rates and decrease cart abandonment. And of course, another financial gain your business will receive as a result of an address finder API is a reduction in failed deliveries as the human error of entering the incorrect address will be eliminated.

Make payment methods easy

Payments can be problematic for mobile users because large number sequences, such as those required for a credit card, are typically challenging to type. Instead, you may invite visitors to create an account on your website, where you can store their credit card information. Although be sure to also offer guest checkout, to avoid deterring customers who just want to get on with the transaction as quickly as possible. 

You may also make use of mobile payment methods like PayPal, Google Wallet, or Apple Play for customers. Offering wallets not only makes the UX smoother and simpler on mobile devices, but it also increases customers’ trust in your website, an important factor in mobile commerce. Integrating an address finder software into your checkout process can further enhance user experience by automatically suggesting accurate address options in real-time, preventing typos, missing characters and abbreviation.

The Fetchify difference

We process millions of data transactions weekly for thousands of clients, from small e-commerce start-ups to large household brands such as LG, Heinz and RBS. Our flagship products, Address Lookup  and UK Postcode Lookup, reduce friction on checkouts, leading to increases in conversion rates, and help reduce failed deliveries and customer frustration.

We are proud to offer fit-for-purpose plug-and-play integrations with most leading business software platforms. We enjoy global coverage in over 250 countries, with businesses from various industries benefiting from our address finder offering.

If you’re looking to boost conversion rates, eliminate failed deliveries, minimise human errors, and provide a seamless experience for customers on your platform, then look no further than the experts in customer data validation and address verification solutions – Fetchify.

The best part is you can try out our 14-day Free Trial before committing to our services. Our excellent technical and customer support team is on hand to answer your burning questions. Make sure to Get in Touch and experience the Fetchify difference – like thousands of e-commerce businesses around the globe.

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About Fetchify

Fetchify’s address lookup and data validation platforms cover more than 250 countries, and increases customer conversion with the fastest, most accurate customer data capture. Fetchify’s flagship products – Address Auto Complete and Postcode Lookup – reduce friction at the checkout, and also significantly increase the number of successful deliveries. Founded in 2008, Fetchify processes millions of data transactions every day for clients ranging from startups to established high-street names, and offers a full suite of data validation tools, including phone, email and bank, too.

Why Hotel and Booking Confirmations Bounce More Than You Think

By Fiona Paton • July 28, 2026

Guest data captured at the point of booking is quietly falling apart before the stay even begins, and peak season is when it costs the most. A guest books a weekend away for the August bank holiday. Room type, dates, total cost, all confirmed on screen. Then nothing. No confirmation email lands in their inbox. Ten minutes later, they're calling the front desk to check the booking actually went through. Nobody did anything wrong here. The booking engine worked. Payment went through. What broke is quieter than that, and far more common than most hospitality businesses realise. The address you have isn't always the address you think you have A significant share of hotel bookings now arrives through an OTA (an online travel agency, like Booking.com or Expedia) rather than direct. That's not new. What's less well understood is what actually lands in the property management system when they do. Many OTAs pass through a masked or proxy email address rather than the guest's real one, generated specifically for that booking and often expiring shortly after the stay ends. It looks like a valid email address. It behaves like one, right up until the property tries to use it for anything beyond the original booking confirmation. Direct bookings aren't much safer. Industry estimates put the proportion of invalid addresses from manually entered guest data at 20 to 45%, a misspelt domain, a transposed digit, a typo made booking late at night on a small phone screen. None of that shows up as a problem until the moment it matters: a pre-arrival email, a late check-in code, a parking permit, a table reservation confirmation. Why this one email matters more than most Booking confirmations aren't treated like other guest communications, because guests don't treat them like other emails. Open rates for confirmation emails run considerably higher than standard marketing sends, and the expectation isn't "eventually"; it's immediate. A guest expects that confirmation within minutes, not by the end of the day. If it doesn't land straight away, the natural read isn't "it's still processing"; it's "something's gone wrong". A guest who doesn't receive a confirmation doesn't shrug it off. They worry, then they call, then someone on your team spends five minutes confirming something that should have taken none. Peak season is when this compounds None of this is especially visible in a quiet month. A handful of bounced confirmations, a few guests calling to check, easily absorbed. Peak season changes the maths. Higher volumes mean more bad records moving through the system at once, and less staff time available to catch each one before it becomes a guest's problem rather than a data problem. The property that could quietly absorb ten failed confirmations in March is dealing with a hundred in August, right when front desk and reservations teams are already stretched thinnest. Peak season doesn't create this problem. It just makes the one that was already there impossible to ignore. What this actually costs The cost isn't just the phone call. A guest who's already anxious about whether their booking is real arrives in a different frame of mind than one who received a warm, accurate pre-arrival email three days before. Upsell opportunities in that pre-arrival window - an early check-in, a room upgrade, a spa slot, depend on the guest actually receiving it in the first place. None of that happens if the address behind it was never valid to begin with. The fix sits earlier than most teams look The instinct when a confirmation bounce is to fix it after the fact: resend, follow up by phone, apologise. The more useful moment is earlier, verifying email and phone at the point they're captured, whether that's a direct booking form or a reconciliation step against whatever an OTA has actually handed over. In practice, that looks like validation built into the booking form itself: if a guest mistypes their email, the system flags it before they hit submit, the same way a checkout might flag an invalid card number. This is exactly what Fetchify does for hospitality businesses: verifying contact details at the source, so the confirmation, the pre-arrival email, the parking permit, all have somewhere real to land. Caught there, it never becomes a guest-facing problem at all. Getting this right at the point of entry does more than protect a confirmation email. It's a faster, less frustrating booking process for the guest, since a flagged typo takes a second to fix rather than derailing the whole form. It's cleaner data feeding into retargeting and post-stay marketing, since accurate contact details are what make audience targeting worth doing in the first place. And it's a real inbox to send a review request to once the stay is over, rather than one more email quietly bouncing into nothing. If your team is capturing guest contact details manually, or reconciling them from OTA bookings, catching the invalid ones before check-in is more straightforward to fix than it sounds. More on how Fetchify helps hospitality businesses keep guest data accurate below.

Thousands of Pitches, and Not One Renewal Missed

By Fiona Paton • July 27, 2026

“I found the process a painless exercise, which involved very little extra work from me, and the success was very high. I would recommend anyone who is experiencing issues with old data to go through a data cleanse.” – Michael Gillespie, Manager of Field Testing, Sports Labs

Courier delivering a parcel and checking his phoe ne

What changed in the UK address database this month

By Fiona Paton • July 21, 2026

What is PAF? The Postcode Address File (PAF®) is Royal Mail’s definitive database of every deliverable address and postcode in the UK. It covers over 32 million delivery points and is updated monthly. If your business relies on accurate address data, at checkout, in your CRM, or for deliveries, PAF is the source that keeps it current. July 2026 in numbers Royal Mail made 54,025 changes to PAF this month. That is not a small number. It represents new homes that need delivering to, businesses that have moved or closed, streets that have been renamed, and addresses that were simply wrong and have now been corrected. Every one of those changes is a record in someone’s database that may now be out of date, and a delivery, a campaign, or a customer communication that could go wrong if the data hasn’t been updated. Delivery point changes at a glance Here’s the full breakdown of what changed, amended, and was removed from PAF in July:

Meet our new delivery parter nShift

By Fiona Paton • July 20, 2026

The Address Is Only Half the Journey. Meet nShift. Fetchify ensures the address is correct at checkout. nShift makes sure the parcel gets there. A validated address is a great start, but it's only half the journey. From there, the parcel still has to find the right carrier, the right label, and the right doorstep. That's a different problem, and it's the one nShift solves. What nShift does nShift is a delivery management platform connecting businesses to 1,000+ carriers across 190 countries through a single integration, checkout, delivery options, carrier selection, tracking, and returns, all in one place instead of a separate system per carrier. Customers using nShift see a 20% increase in conversions at checkout and up to 60% fewer "where is my order" queries. Superdry is a good example with 515 stores, 21 websites, and shipping to 100+ countries. As the business scaled internationally, nShift let them onboard new carriers fast and get full visibility across every shipment. As Gordon Knox, Superdry's Business Transformation and Logistics Director, put it, onboarding carriers quickly was essential to a growing international business; that's exactly what they got, plus the data to hold carriers accountable on cost and service. Why we're recommending them Some of nShift's own clients already use Fetchify to validate their checkout data, so we've seen firsthand what good address data unlocks downstream in nShift's platform. That's the real reason for this partnership: the two products solve adjacent halves of the same problem, and we've watched it work in practice. Fetchify validates the address in real time, catching typos, missing flat numbers, and misspelt street or town names as the customer types, without slowing the checkout down, and confirms phone and email are live at the same time. That clean, structured data flows straight into nShift, which picks the right carrier automatically and keeps the customer updated with branded tracking. No reformatting. No manual fixes. No booking failures from bad data. The result: higher conversion, fewer failed deliveries, fewer support tickets, because the two weakest links in the checkout-to-doorstep chain (bad addresses, clunky carrier logistics) are both handled properly. Who this is for Any ecommerce business shipping physical goods stands to benefit, especially if you're juggling multiple carriers, shipping cross-border, or scaling into markets where one carrier doesn't cover it. If delivery reliability has become as much of a pain point as address accuracy, this is worth a look.