Ecommerce blog

The year of the mobile device

In 2011, for the first time ever, mobile devices (such as Iphones and Ipads) outsold traditional desktop PC’s and laptops. It is estimated by 2015, more people will be connecting to the internet and websites using mobile devices than desktop and laptop computers.
According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, mobile ecommerce is projected to grow to more than $100 billion USD within the next couple of years.

The rise in popularity of mobile phones (mainly Iphones and Android phones) along with tablets (such as the Ipad) is having a dramatic effect on the retail market. Many shoppers are now either shopping online from their phone while on the couch or out and about. The more savvy shoppers are also using their mobile phones in traditional retail stores to see if they can get a better deal on a product they are looking at (or see what other options are available online that may not be available in the store).

Mobile devices are also being used heavily in the real estate market where potential investors and tenants are now searching for listings online when out an about.

If you already have an online store or website, it may not be enough to cater for the growing mobile market. At Mantis Technologies, we have developed new technology to allow us to detect and serve up mobile friendly sites to your customers.
These mobile sites have two distinct advantages:

• Mobile friendly sites are thought to receive higher rankings in Google when searching on a mobile device. This makes sense as Google can detect which is a mobile friendly site and people using Google on a mobile device are better served with mobile friendly sites rather than traditional sites which are generally quite fiddly to use.
• A good mobile friendly site will be designed specifically for the screen size and also the way a user interacts with their device. This means that the elements of the site that are needed by the mobile user should be rebuilt into a new mobile friendly section of the site that has an interface built to show nicely on the mobile phone and be designed to be used as a touch screen device rather than with a mouse and keyboard. This dramatically increases the usability of the site and therefore results in higher conversion rates and customer retention.

On the 1st January 2012, we launched a mobile friendly site for Lime Tree Kids. If you open up www.limetreekids.com.au/mobile on your smartphone, you will see how a well thought out and developed mobile website should work. Within 24 hours of the mobile site launching, it was already generating many sales and attracted very positive comments from hundreds of potential and existing customers.

At Mantis Technologies, we specialise in developing mobile friendly sites for the Ecommerce and Real Estate marketplace and if you already are using our MantisShop or MantisProperty platforms, we can easily customise our mobile ‘plug in’ site for your website.

There are also some very distinct advantages with creating mobile friendly websites over building ‘apps’. Mobile friendly sites can be built to look and feel like an ‘app’ (see the Lime Tree Kids mobile site as an example. Mobile friendly sites can also be built to ensure they work on all popular phones (Iphone, Android and the Windows 7 phones) whereas apps need to be built from scratch for each device and get approval from their manufacturers to be released which can be a very time consuming and expensive exercise.

Please contact us for more information if you are interested on learning how a mobile friendly site can work for you.