In my first post on mobile commerce, I talked about the future of m-commerce and the need to provide a mobile-friendly user experience.

Some of you may be ready to take that leap into the world of m-commerce. Others of you may be shaking your head at the prospect of keeping up with yet another technological advance.

First, let me reassure you that there is nothing to fear. In fact, there is plenty to get excited about when thinking about the tremendous opportunity to grow your business through m-commerce. Here are the things that get me excited about m-commerce:

• It provides an additional channel to reach consumers – both new customers and our most loyal patrons.
• It allows us to interact with shoppers virtually all the time – people typically carry their phones just about everywhere they go, making it possible to reach them when they are out conducting the business of life.
• Mobile shoppers are much more motivated to complete their purchase – often they are searching for an instant answer to a current problem or desire.
• There is more impulse buying – a person sees, hears, or thinks about something and decides to make an immediate purchase.
• It is possible to offer goods and services based on a person’s location.
• The number of consumers shopping from their mobile devices is expected to grow exponentially – those of us poised to serve the mobile market stand to benefit immensely.

Setting up a mobile commerce site

The primary consideration when planning to launch an m-commerce site is deciding how to set up your mobile site. While it is possible to create a separate mobile site, the better (and much easier) option is to modify your existing site to recognize mobile devices and render the requested page formatted for the type of device accessing it. There are major advantages to this approach including:

• No need to build or promote an additional website – you don’t have to re-create content specifically for the mobile platform; nor do you have to re-enter all of your existing data.
• You keep the same url – this offers major benefits in terms of customer recognition and search engine ranking.
• Search engine success – you will preserve your current search engine rankings and avoid the risk of diluting your “SEO juice”. When you have 2 sites with similar content, you risk splitting the SEO value of your page content as well as links to your site. This can adversely affect the rankings of both sites.
• Avoids competing with yourself – your existing pages are likely to rank higher than pages on a newer mobile site. Given the size of most smartphone displays, a lower ranking will likely result in not being found. Mobile users are all about finding what they want quickly – if they land on your regular site first and find it difficult to navigate, they are unlikely to make a return visit to your mobile site.

Vortx introduces a new mobile platform for AspDotNetStorefront

Vortx is excited to announce our new mobile platform for AspDotNetStorefront! Our latest offering includes a mobile skin and a mobile shopping cart. Our integrated platform automatically detects the user’s device and renders the requested page – specifically formatted for the type of device that is accessing it. Our mobile platform creates a fully-featured mobile version of the original site, maintaining all of the core functionality needed to provide a complete shopping experience.

The mobile shopping cart is critical. The primary reason why most shoppers fail to complete their online purchases from mobile devices is the difficulty of navigating through the check-out process. Have you ever tried to enter detailed information on such a small screen? Our mobile shopping cart makes it not only possible, it makes it easy. By providing your customers with a check-out process designed specifically to provide an uncomplicated shopping experience on mobile devices, you have effectively overcome the biggest obstacle to achieving success in the world of mobile commerce!

Our integrated mobile platform provides a mobile-friendly user experience that not only makes it simple for mobile shoppers to quickly find what they are looking for, but also makes it easy for them to complete their purchases as well as manage their accounts, maintain wishlists and email products to friends, all from their mobile device.

Another significant advantage to our mobile platform is that it provides the ability to edit content independently on either your m-commerce platform or your regular site without one impacting the other. Because we strongly advocate maintaining only one site, we have provided the ability to edit your content to appeal specifically to your mobile audience. On other occasions, you may wish to add additional content such as detailed descriptions or multi-media elements appropriate only for your desktop and laptop audience. Our mobile platform gives you the ability to customize content for each audience with only one site!

The Vortx mobile platform for AspDotNetStorefront supports the vast majority of mobile operating systems with specific support for the following devices:

• iPhone
• RIM/Blackberry (OS 4.6+)
• Symbian (OS 9.2+)
• Android
• Palm Pre

We are very excited about what our platform offers to those trying to establish a presence in the m-commerce world. The ability to provide a satisfying, i.e. quick and easy, user experience from landing page all the way through check-out provides a giant leap forward in this emerging marketplace.

Even if you use a different shopping cart program or are not ready to commit to a specific mobile commerce platform, we hope you will ask to take a look at our demo site to see for yourself just how much can be accomplished with a well-designed mobile commerce site.

Look for our next installment on m-commerce where we will talk about driving traffic to your mobile site.

Vortx’s mobile platform for AspDotNetStorefront is now released. To learn more about mobile commerce, please join Jo Benson, Vortx COO, for one of our upcoming FREE webinars: “Go Mobile!” Register now for either our December 10th or December 17th presentation.

Have you already launched your mobile site? If so, what have been the challenges and successes you have experienced?

Tags: AspDotNetStoreFront, Cart, e-commerce, Mobile Commerce

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Mobile Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.