5 Keys to Mobile E-Commerce: Mobify Webinar reminder
Just a friendly reminder that the Mobify webinar is fast approaching!
When?
February 24 at 10am PST / 1pm EST
Why?
Learn 5 key tips to make your mobile e-commerce site successful
To attend:
1. On Feb 24 shortly before 10am PST / 1pm EST, go to https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/j.php?ED=148305412&UID=0&PW=NYmY4YmIyNDlm&RT=MiM0
2. Enter the meeting password: webinar
3. Click “Join”
Mobify Webinar: 5 Keys to Mobile E-Commerce
With mobile and tablet web use increasing exponentially, e-commerce retailers are embracing a massive growth opportunity.
Retailers with existing e-commerce stores can benefit hugely from a well executed mobile site – learn about what you can do to make it a success!
We will discuss best case practices and share success stories from retailers.
YOU WILL LEARN:
- Mobile design basics
- Improving PPC conversions on mobile
- Optimizing checkout flow on mobile
- Combining mobile web and apps
- and much more!
We hope you join us Thursday, February 24 at 10am PST / 1pm EST to discuss this exciting topic.
Evolving Mobify Studio – Part 2
The previous post in the series described the design of Mobify Studio, and how it fit the mobile market in 2008. This post will examine changes to those assumptions caused by a changing mobile market and reveal the improvements made possible by proliferation of new devices.
In past three years, devices with high-quality browsers captured most of the market. iPhone, Android, and Blackberry 6 browsers are now competitive with desktop ones in correctness of Javascript and CSS implementations. Meanwhile, increased use of mobile social networking, as well as bookmark sharing and synchronization, made use of m.yoursite.com a problem. Today, a URL can pass through multiple services used by both mobile and desktop users. Making sure that user ends up on correct URL for their platform is becoming more and more difficult. In addition, having a separate mobile domain introduces SEO concerns, requires additional SSL certificates and DNS configuration, and gets even more complicated when more device types are added (tablet, TV).
These changes made us revisit the original assumptions. Our toolkit is now expanded to include complex JavaScript processing, and use of m.yoursite.com can hinder deployment, URL sharing, and use of SSL encryption. So, we started thinking about serving a single copy of website to both desktop and mobile users, and using JavaScript to transform it into mobile form. This approach can remove a whole lot of issues, in exchange for a single big one: how can we make this work correctly and quickly?
The most obvious way to transform a website on the client-side is by using override stylesheets for CSS (possibly delivered through media queries), and JavaScript content rewriting for HTML. The difficulty with this method is that all resources (images, scripts, stylesheets, frames) start loading as they are parsed, and browsers give us no reliable tools for preventing or canceling HTTP requests. So, if one was to modify the page after its markup finishes parsing, the resulting mobile page will load all the desktop resources, all the mobile-specific ones, and spend CPU time on extra processing. Since mobile browsers load few resources at a time and suffer from higher network latencies (especially on 3G), this is a recipe for unacceptably low performance.
To maintain reasonable performance, our client-side solution would need to exercise control over which resources are loaded before rest of the browser can see the resource and start an HTTP request. This requires overriding default browser behavior of fetching every resource as soon as its HTML tag is parsed in the document. We have figured out a way to accomplish this in the new Mobify product.
The webpage includes Mobify script snippets that lie dormant most of the time, but initialize and capture page content as text if they detect a mobile browser. As a result, the captured content is not processed by the browser, preventing it from issuing HTTP requests or executing unwanted Javascript. Now, transformation code can build the mobile page out of fragments of desktop one, and load just the pieces that are needed. Finally, the newly constructed markup is injected into page itself and has the desired external resources re-enabled, resulting in the complete mobile page.
As a result, mobile and desktop pages can live at same URL despite using drastically different markup and resources. We already do have some websites using this technology, such as http://alibris.com, http://kiwicollection.com, and http://threadless.com. In future posts in this series, we will describe the lower-level technology used to perform content escaping and transformation, and provide details on tools that the mobile page author can use to control inclusion of HTML and external content.
Evolving Mobify Studio – Part 1
When we started Mobify in the winter of 2008, one thing was clear: websites sucked on mobile. The few that were optimized for mobile looked liked WAP sites that had been subtlety retagged as HTML.
With the iPhone raising the bar for mobile experiences, it wasn’t enough for websites to just “work” on a phone anymore. Navigation, content and forms were expected to be laid out logically to fill screen. Content had to be built from the ground up for delivery over low bandwidth connections to slow devices. Most importantly with the collision of the mobile and desktop webs there needed to be URL mapping between the two so that no matter how a viewer arrived on a page, they always got an experience tailored to their device.
We built Mobify Studio to enables designers to build the fantastic mobile experiences that viewers demanded. Three years later, the fundamentals behind building great mobile experience haven’t changed but the mobile devices themselves have.
Smart phone traffic dominates today’s mobile web. Over 80% of our network traffic could be classified as “Smart Phone”. These powerful devices connect to the web using fast, reliable 3G and Wifi connections. This shift in the device landscape has caused us to re-evaluate the design decisions we made in 2008 while building out current version of Mobify Studio.
Decision made in 2008: The mobile web is not ready for JavaScript.
Mobify Studio’s content optimizations alter the DOM. JavaScript is bound to specific DOM representations. Our modifications subtlety break existing JavaScript in unpredictable ways. In 2008, mobile browsers have incomplete or incorrect implementations of specifications crucial to JavaScript. With the goal of delivering sites with a minimal footprint, we can’t afford to serve JavaScript content to devices only to have break. We designed Mobify Studio to strip JavaScript from pages.
Decision made in 2008: Mobile websites should live at mdot.
To receive a page optimized by Mobify Studio, a browser must make a request to Mobify’s webservers. Sites made with the Studio live at a different domain than the desktop website. Using DNS CNAMEs we made it possible to deploy mobile views to an mdot like m.yoursite.com. This had the helpful side effect of sharing HTTP Cookies, allowing for simultaneous login between mobile and desktop sites. However it also created a need to redirect mobile traffic from the desktop website to the mobile view. To do that we developed three methods for handling redirection at either the webserver, application or client side level.
Smart phone dominance challenges these decisions. In the next post we’ll outline how we’re adjusting our core technology to build the next generation of great mobile experiences.
Mobify Studio homepage circa 2008!
Threadless Mobile: Vote, Buy, And Be Social.
Founded in 2000, Threadless has evolved from an online t-shirt design company into an international community-driven design platform featuring merchandise designed by and for its fan base of nearly one million users.
The rise of social media and e-commerce has catapulted mobile devices to the center of today’s digital lifestyle. Threadless users asked for a mobile website that made it easy to browse, shop, and vote on new designs, no matter where they were. With this in mind, Threadless turned to Mobify to power their mobile presence.
“Mobify allowed us to effortlessly take our site mobile, without any changes to the existing code,” said Threadless CEO Thomas Ryan. “The new mobile site allows us to better connect with our amazing community. We’re particularly excited that users can score community-submitted designs from anywhere.”
Now wherever you are, you can shop, score, and participate with Threadless through your mobile phone.
To learn more read our Threadless case study .
