Mobile Commerce – Apps vs. Websites
Mobile commerce is one of the most exciting new market segments on the Web today. There’s a big opportunity not only in improving the way mobile purchasing works, but also in inventing new ways for discovering, sharing and promoting merchandise. Yet, most of the e-commerce retailers are not prepared to serve their mobile users, as our research showed. “Let’s get an app” seems to be the strategy for many retailers – which is not nearly enough.
E-commerce has grown to billions of dollars per year thanks to taking advantage of Web fundamentals. Here are just some of the strategies that are crucial to long-term success of online vendors:
> SEO & SEM
> Affiliate Tracking
> Social Media Compatibility (through URL mapping)
All of which need to seamlessly work on mobile. It’s pretty much impossible to fully support these strategies in native apps, which have the added requirement of being discovered & downloaded prior to use. Mobile web alone has what it takes to implement a complete mobile commerce portal and retailers seem to agree. It’s going to be very exciting to watch this space develop in 2011.
Mobify Weekly – The Latest Threads in the Mobile Web
Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new issue of Mobify Weekly. Here are some interesting stories that we’ve come across this week. Enjoy!
Mobile browsing a consumer hit Best practice for any company is to have all of its bases covered on both desktop and mobile. Covering all fronts by investing in both mobile web and mobile apps offers a significant competitive advantage.
This mobile web thing is getting serious The Yankee Group regularly reviews mobile websites and hands out awards for best user experience. Google tops the rankings and the competition is stiff all across the board which will only get more intense, particularly in the e-commerce sector.
1-800-Flowers.com tops $1 million in quarterly m-commerce sales The online retailer giant’s mobile sales went from $10,000 in Summer of 2009 to $1 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2011. These numbers appear staggering until the rising adopting rate of smartphones is taken into account.
How mobile websites, Web apps, and HTML5 are good for everyone In just two short years the number of mobile sites rose from 150,000 to a staggering 3.01 million. With widespread adoption, all the buzz around HTML 5, and traffic growth charts that show no signs of decline we’re confident that the next set of metrics will make these last two years seem minuscule in comparison.
Changing face of mobility = trillion dollar business by 2014 For long now there have been predictions of exploding mobile industry growth rates in the near future. With present day metrics in hand we can finally say that the time of mobile web has come.
Help stop the spread of NIBS (Native is Better Syndrome) We like the acronym and approve of the sentiment. Mobile web has already surpassed native apps in some regards and shows no signs of stopping as more and more websites optimize for mobile.
Mobile web nears tipping point Interesting stats on how many websites have gone mobile as well as the overview of the two pioneers, Facebook and Google who have clearly dedicated a lot of resources into their mobile strategies.
Little or No Mobile Strategy in Most Companies, says Forrester Some worrying statistics shed light on the fact that most companies are unprepared for what the mobile web has in store, despite reports of sky rocketing mobile traffic and mobile growth forecasts for the near future.
Greystripe CEO Calls Q4 The “Blowout Quarter For Mobile Advertising,” Predicts 600% Growth Just in time for the Holiday rush the traffic numbers on all mobile fronts seemed to have hit the tipping point. With such incredibly positive Q4 predictions, we’re pondering what 2011 might have in store for the industry.
Have a fantastic rest of the week and see you all next Thursday!
All hail the adaptable web
The responsive web meme was kicked off by Ethan Marcotte’s excellent post of the same name. In his post, Ethan describes how media queries can be used to build sites with the ability to hide elements for smaller screen sizes. For example to create an iphone-specific styling you could use the following CSS:
- @media screen and (min-width: 321px) { /* do something for iphones in landscape */}
But the responsive web isn’t good enough to take us where we need to go to create a beautiful mobile-optimized site. Jason Grigsby does a good job summarizing the problems with the responsive web. In an article titled Media Queries are Fool’s Gold he shows that media queries are not a panacea for solving mobile optimization. The crux of his argument is that this approach reduces content for mobile, and does nothing to optimize it. Furthermore, there are serious technical limitations. If you’re using media queries to show high-resolution images specific for desktop, then those will be downloaded on mobile even if they aren’t displayed. But if the responsive web is fool’s gold, Jason’s proposed solution of custom built web mobile sites is an abandoned mine… with a lot of toxic cleanup left to do.
Custom mobile development is a dead end for content or brand sites. Building a good one (think Amazon, or Ebay) requires a similar design/content work-effort as creating a desktop site. Often they require their own backend. Content gets fragmented. Maintenance is a nightmare. And then a new device comes along that changes everything.
The future is the adaptable web — and it’s like the responsive web, only turned up to 11. In the adaptable web, it’s not about hiding content from mobile users, it’s about remixing everything in your site.
Let’s take a step back and look at the future of adapting content. Adapting content for different types of devices is not going to be just a temporary phenomenon limited to our current transition period of new devices. With the flurry of announcements in the past few months of a number of new tablet style devices, not to mention the launch of a renewed Windows Mobile platform, there’s every indication that we’re going to see a dramatically expanded ecosystem of devices, screen types and interaction methods for the foreseeable future. Providing completely different content silos for every platform is not a viable option for most organizations with this kind of complexity in the market place. What we need is infinitely adaptable remixing — the ability to mix up any type of content anywhere, for any type of device. We need the adaptable web.
Today, Mobify offers a best-of-breed mobile adaption layer that provides exactly the kind of infinitely adaptable remixing to future-proof your design. We remove all the technical challenges that limit media-queries, including scaling asset sizes and supporting complete reordering, blending and optimization of your content — while still allowing you to use media queries where they’re best suited (yup, we support them!).
Mobify is focused on creating the best possible mobile web experience and bringing this experience to as many sites as we can. dotMobi reports that just 29% of the top 10000 Alexa sites on the internet have a mobile optimized presence. But the situation is far worse than the report suggests. Of those 29%, a significant number offer only a mobile ghetto — a mobile “optimized” site that is actually optimal for only one family of mobile devices, or limits mobile users to a tiny portion of the site content and functionality. Clearly there’s a long way to go to making the web a better place for those of us out and about with our handsets.
As the device market diversifies, Mobify will continue to deliver a solution that remixes, adapts and optimizes site content and functionality. We’ll have solutions whether you need to adapt to smaller screens, touch displays or future interaction methods we can only guess at.
Take Your Site Mobile – Mobify Webinar
It’s that time again! A new live webinar is coming this Thursday, Oct 28 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET. Mark your calendars! If you’re just getting started with Mobify or would like to brush up on your mobile design, we’d love to have you join us!
We are very excited and are looking forward to getting a chance to see all of you! Can’t make it this Thursday? No problem! You can find all our recorded webinars on our blog! Hope to see you all this Thursday!
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Current State of Mobile e-Commerce
InternetRetailer.com regularly publishes The Top 500 List – a study of the biggest players in online retail space. We went through the list curious to see how many had mobile optimized pages. What we found was shocking: out of the top 300 sites that we looked at 220 weren’t optimized for mobile (yet).
E-Commerce sites that have yet to optimize for mobile browsing might be failing to convert mobile visitors and losing revenue from potential sales. Unoptimized sites perform slowly on handheld devices further delaying the shopping and checkout process. Read More
