The experts are right: mobile browsing is the wave of the future. With the explosion of the smartphone market, phones have become more than just vocal communication devices.

Just how big is mobile for ecommerce? According to Leo J. Shapiro and Associates, 47 percent of smartphone owners use their devices to find more information on a purchase, while 36 percent rely on their devices for product reviews on retail websites. Your customer base will use their phones to purchase; the only question is whether or not they’ll buy through your store.

But mobile browsing presents a unique business issue for online stores everywhere: your website isn’t built for use on a mobile device. To stay ahead of the curve, you must optimize your online store for mobile browsing. Here are five reasons why.

How many times have you tried to click a button or link on a website and accidentally pressed the wrong thing? To ease the shopping experience, buttons must be bigger and spaced out. Optimizing your site for fat fingers saves a lot of hassle for the shopper, ensuring a smoother customer experience.

With less room to browse, displaying the most important information to lead the customer from browsing to checkout greatly enhances the chance of conversion. If it’s too difficult to find what they’re looking for, customers will abandon the site before they’ve entered the sales process.

In a similar way, clarifying navigation paths by including breadcrumbs and simplifying how shoppers explore your site eases the mobile experience.

See a pattern? Mobile browsing should be reduced to the basics. Mobile shoppers require a simplified checkout process to actually make the purchase. If the process is too difficult or takes too long, you’re bound to lose the sale.

Have you ever opened a website on your phone and zoomed in? A non-optimized site may require you to scroll sideways or up and down for every few lines you read. If you optimize your site for mobile, content fits on the screen so customers don’t have to pan or scroll.