Today we’re happy to announce the next round of updates to Mobify Studio, our point-and-click interface to build your mobile website. Updates like this are rolled out for free every 2 weeks for all Studio users – if you haven’t tried it out yet, sign up at cloud.mobify.com.

The goal for this round of updates was to make a small improvements that make a big difference to the user-experience. This time, we’ve added:

• Easier access to on-device mobile previews
• Improved tabbing behaviour while editing CSS and HTML

Easier access to on-device previews

We noticed something when user testing: people were asking for a way to easily view their mobile site on actual mobile devices while they were developing it.

This feature has always been available, but it was only exposed near the end of the mobile-build process. Now, there’s a link available right on the build screen that emails you a URL so you can preview your site. It’s also great for showing off your work to other people!

This allows you get a real idea of how your mobile site feels on a mobile device. Simulators are great, but sometimes you just need to see it on an actual phone.

Tabbing in text areas

Mobify Studio is browser based and, up until now, tabbing obeyed the default browser behavior of cycling between focus areas.

Since everyone tabs when editing CSS and HTML, we found that Studio users were encountering unexpected behaviour and hopping to the next focus area, instead of indenting text. In response, we’ve overridden the default behaviour so tabbing while editing CSS and HTML in Studio now behaves as it normally would in an editor.

From the feedback we've received so far, these changes have made it easier and faster to develop and test with Studio.

All these features are already enabled on your Studio accounts. Try them out by logging into cloud.mobify.com!

Read more about updates to Mobify here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email us at support at mobify.com and we’ll get back to you!

Men’s apparel brand Bonobos is offering mobile-only exclusives and promotions to on-the-go consumers via its new mobile-optimized site.

Mobile Commerce Daily June 13, 2011

Read more

Today we’re happy to announce the next updates to Mobify Studio, our point-and-click interface to build your mobile website. Updates like this are rolled out for free every 2 weeks for all Studio users – if you haven’t tried it out yet, sign up at cloud.mobify.com.

Our goal for this round of updates was to streamline the workflow and create more consistency in the UI to make Studio a nicer place to spend time.

There are 2 major features launching in this update:

• New toolbar
• Improved Publishing flow

Template manager

One core element of Mobify is a templating engine that lets you build one mobile template per desktop template, making the process of building and managing a mobile site much simpler.

To organize templating better, we’ve built a new template manager that appears when you’re in the "Navigate" view.

The philosophy behind this is simple: it makes it easier to see what mobile templates you’ve already made while navigating your site. It also allows you to see which template gets rendered for the page that you are on.

All this information is displayed neatly in a column on the left of your screen instead of being in a completely separate view. It iterates from top to bottom, greying out the templates that don't match to give you a conceptual idea of how Studio is determining which template to use.

Toolbar

The second major change we made to Studio was an update of the toolbar that’s present directly under the URL bar in all Studio screens.

The toolbar is now contextual, only showing you relevant functionality for the view you are on.

For instance, if you’re in the "Navigate" view, it will show you the address bar so you can type in a URL within Studio. If you switch to the "HTML" view, it will show you all of the relevant HTML files and syntax guide link.

Overall, there is also more consistency to the UI, as well as a consistent sidebar that always displays information, instead being continually hidden and revealed depending on what you’re doing.

All these features are already enabled on your Studio accounts. Try them out by logging into cloud.mobify.com!

Read more about updates to Mobify here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email us at support at mobify.com and we’ll get back to you!

Today we’re announcing a series of updates to Mobify Studio, our point-and-click interface to build your mobile website. Updates like this one are rolled out every 2 weeks for all Studio users — if you haven’t tried it out yet, you can do so for free at cloud.mobify.com.

Our goal for this round of updates was clarity around the mobile build process and simplifying the learning curve. There are 3 major features launching in this update:

• Improved welcome screen
• Interactive tutorial
• New URL matching

1. Improved welcome screen

When you start a project in Studio, you are greeted by a new welcome screen with four collapsible tabs.

It's designed for clarity, with each tab representing a distinct step along the path to successfully launching your mobile site.

You'll also see this screen every time you return to an existing project, allowing you to see how far along you are in the process and what you have to do next. It also gives you easy access to settings and a preview of your site so far.

2. Interactive Tutorial

Once you create a project from the welcome screen, Studio will open. We know it’s often hard getting started with a new piece of software, so, in response to user feedback, we created an interactive tutorial that helps you build a working version of your mobile homepage.

For example, it will prompt you to select your site’s primary navigation elements and place them correctly on your mobile site. Once you select them via point-and-click, they’ll automatically be added to the dropdown menu on your mobile site. This lets you get a feel for Studio, while at the same time building something you can use in real life.

3. New URL matching

We initially launched Studio with limited URL matching functionality. The only kind of wildcard matching for mobile templates was prefix-matching, which means we were able to match URLs like:

• http://www.mobify.com/blog/2012/*
• http://www.mobify.com/blog/2012/06/*
• http://www.mobify.com/blog/2012/06/21/*

While this was fine for many sites, we had users asking for more powerful URL matching, as we were not able to match wildcard elements in the middle, like:

• http://www.mobify.com/blog/*/06/*

The new URL matching feature extends prefix matching. We built this feature in response to a customer who had WordPress categories for types of cars: economy, compact, luxury, convertible, etc. all having the same page template. (Aside, this kind of URL structure is often done for SEO purposes.)

• http://www.example.com/economy/rental/
• http://www.example.com/compact/rental/
• http://www.example.com/luxury/rental/

The customer is now able to build a single template in Studio matching all these kinds of cars:

• http://www.example.com/*/rental/

All these features are already enabled on your Studio accounts. Try them out by logging into cloud.mobify.com! 

Read more about updates to Mobify here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email us at support at mobify.com and we'll get back to you!

With the success of new mobile websites, the facts around how a mobile website increases your mobile commerce conversion rate, average order size and e-commerce revenues have become well established.  Mobile optimized websites work.

More recently, we've been digging deeper into how mobile websites contribute more than what’s immediately obvious.

The most obvious benefit of a mobile website is that it improves the user experience for customers – Google has some in-depth data on how a good mobile experience boosts user experience.

An improved user experience applies not only to customers in the purchasing process, but also to seeking information.  For instance, many customers will search for store locations on their mobile device and research or price a product while in store.

The mobile device is bridging the digital and physical world.

For both multi-channel and e-commerce retailers, mobile contributes to your bottom line – even if the resulting revenues aren't necessarily attributed directly to mobile site revenue.

Points and Assists

To explain how a mobile website contributes beyond just direct mobile commerce revenues, let's use a sports metaphor of a basketball team. The team has many players who fit together with the goal of maximizing the number of points it scores.

Only one player can score every point (or 2 or 3 pointer) but behind each point scored is a number of passes and assists. To see the full picture of mobile commerce we need to look at the team, how it works together and both the scorers of the points and the teammates who provide the assists.

Your mobile website scores when a customer buys directly on their mobile device. Your mobile website also provides assists to its teammates when someone uses your store locator to find the nearest outlet, emails a gift idea to a friend and shares their latest purchase or object of desire on social media.

A good mobile site scores points and contributes valuable assists.  So, think of your mobile website as the Steve Nash of your e-commerce strategy: a valuable scorer that's also great at setting up plays and assisting the team.

So, how much money is mobile making for me?

This question consistently arises as one of the top questions we hear at conferences, in phone calls and at in-person meetings with customers.

To answer properly, we need to break it down into two smaller questions:

1. What is my direct e-commerce revenue on mobile devices?
2. What is my indirect e-commerce revenue assisted by mobile devices?

1. Direct revenue on mobile devices

The first question is easy to answer with your analytics.  Dive into Google Analytics, Omniture, or your analytics package of choice and segment out mobile devices and you have your answer.

This is were your mobile points are scored.

2. Indirect revenue assisted by mobile devices

Here's where things get interesting — where mobile-influenced revenue starts to show up in desktop e-commerce revenues. To return to our basketball metaphor, how many assists does mobile provide?

Short of interviewing your customers, it’s incredibly hard to establish a causal link between a mobile site and mobile-influenced revenues.  However, some retailers have gone ahead and done this and we can look to their examples for guidance.

• The first source is BestBuy: "The multichannel Best Buy consumer who uses a mobile device makes 15% more e-commerce purchases than the non-mobile consumer, said Chris Moroz, Best Buy associate manager for digital analytics. And, for in-store purchases, the mobile Best Buy consumer is 25% more valuable."
• Next up, data from Neilsen that says people responding to mobile ads are 4 times as likely to buy on their PC than on their mobile device.
• And lastly, eBay's second quarter earnings for 2012 provided some good insights such as, '"Mobile is impacting a significant portion of eBay’s business," said Donahoe. "Mobile shoppers and mobile payers are three to four times more valuable than Web only."'

One of Mobify’s customers has done experiments to track their users' activity across mobile and desktop transactions. From those experiments, they report that for every $1 the customer spends on mobile, they spend $6 on desktop e-commerce.

Avinash Kaushik has a great, long, in-depth post on how to build your own system to count points scored and assists contributed called Multi-Channel Attribution: Definitions, Models and a Reality Check that also tries to incorporate in-store purchases.

So what's the answer for your business?

Talk to us and find out.  We're glad to help you understand the opportunity for you to score points and assists on mobile.

The Mobify platform powers over $100-million in mobile commerce revenues for leaders like Starbucks, ideeli, Beyond the Rack, Threadless and and more.

Talk to a Mobify mobile expert.