Igor Faletski
5 Paradoxes Shaping the Future of Mobile Commerce
Remember when it took 23 clicks to find movie showtimes on your mobile phone? While that may seem like an eon ago, in reality it’s just been a few short years. The mobile evolution has been advancing at a break-neck pace.
“Mobile is ramping up faster than any other technology we have seen in the past,” says Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. Mobile web adoption is happening eight times faster than traditional web adoption in the late ’90s.
With that growth comes a new set of user behaviors and consumer trends. What’s the reality when it comes to the new mobile commerce landscape? Here are five facts that will have striking implications for the future of mobile commerce.
1. Customers Spend More Time on Their Mobile Devices Than Desktops.
My company powers about 20,000 ecommerce sites. The average desktop order in 2011 was $95.19, and the average mobile order amounted to $96.92. The difference of $1.73 per order may appear small, but that 2% increase in average cart size can dramatically affect a company’s bottom line.
While multiple factors contribute to this data, the most important may be the power of the tablet, which has quickly emerged as the third digital screen in consumers’ lives, in addition to desktops and smartphones.
Catering to the Mobile Marketplace
Far more than a fad, mobile technology marks a fundamental shift in how we communicate, find information, and shop. By 2014, the number of mobile Web users is projected to overtake the number of desktop users.
You may already be witnessing this macro shift with your Web site. How much of your Web traffic today comes from mobile devices? Five percent? Twenty percent? No matter what the exact figure is, you can bet it will be higher in the future.
James Sherrett joins Mobify as Vice President of Marketing
I am super excited today to welcome James Sherrett to the Mobify team as our new VP of Marketing. He will be responsible for leading all marketing efforts and collaborating with the platform team, client services and sales to tell the Mobify story.
James combines analytic thinking with technical understanding and a creative mind. He brings his years of marketing success in startups and established technology companies to the Mobify team. I asked James why he wanted to join and he said, “It’s not everyday you get a chance to join a killer company like Mobify with a kick ass product running for customers like Threadless, Lululemon and Conde Nast. Add in the incredible folks I get to work with and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
When James gets tired of winning marketing battles, he enjoys the outdoors (fishing, hunting and foraging), cooking, sports and travel. It’s rare to find someone so entrepreneurial, versatile and driven right here in our hometown of Vancouver and we’re really happy to have him.
Welcome aboard, James!
Mobify Acquires mobify.com and mobify.net Domains
One of the big goals we have at Mobify is making the web truly mobile. It is a complex problem – the pace of web progress is the fastest it’s ever been. Devices, content management systems and UI frameworks are increasingly fragmented. Mobile web needs innovative infrastructure – we’re working hard on building it together with friends at Sencha and Phonegap. Today we’re excited to announce the acquisition of mobify.com and mobify.net domains which will make finding us even easier. From now on mobify.com will be the home of all Mobify products and services – we look forward to seeing you there!
Content Delivery Networks in the Mobile Web era
Everybody likes their Internet fast. Content delivery services (Akamai, Limelight and others) speed up the Web significantly, distributing your media across a global network of caching servers. It’s very likely that the end user is closer to an Akamai mirror than to the origin server, so the experience is improved significantly.
Enter the age of mobile web. At Mobify, we believe that every link on the Web should present an amazing mobile experience. One way to do this is by making content management systems mobile-aware. When the CMS detects a mobile user, it launches an alternate rendering path and generates new HTML server-side. This new mobile web page is then presented to the user – for a great example check out WPTouch, the most popular mobile plugin for WordPress.
The problem is, most content delivery networks don’t bother telling the origin server about mobile users, serving whatever is cached for the URL. And why should they? The whole point of CDN cache is reducing the time it takes to access web content. Plus, when not done properly server-side mobile rendering can actually be worse than the desktop website, as this comic illustrates.
So, what to do? Akamai allows limited code execution right on its edge nodes with EdgeComputing, but this is counterproductive for today’s agile web companies. Mobify’s Studio service relies on JavaScript to detect mobile users, redirecting them to the “m-dot” version of the same URL which is cached separately (see it in action by going to wired.com or newyorker.com on mobile; both use Akamai). In the future we’re going to see even more mobile rendering shifted into the browser, powered by JavaScript and HTML5. This brings the best of both worlds – responsive client-side apps that can be stored on a CDN for optimal performance (we use Amazon Cloudfront).
In my next post, I’ll try to guess why Matt Mullenweg doesn’t use WPTouch on his beautiful personal blog and share some of the things we learned about Drupal 8 from Dries’ DrupalCon keynote. Stay tuned!
