Mobile Commerce's Rapid Developement

It's been a wild ride for the mobile community in the year of 2009. I'd say this is the year that really puts smartphones on the map. As far as capabilities goes, the iPhones and various Android (DROID) devices really pulled ahead with their mobile influences. The iPhone's app store itself nearly revolutionized and standardized the way mobile platform should be.

Just before Cyber Monday this year, Usablenet successfully launched 8 more ecommerce clients onto their mobile platform solutions; it appears Usablenet seems to be the vendor of choice when it comes to a quick turnkey solution to generate mobile sales. At my full time work, I've been asked to help brainstorm a full on mobile strategy for the company as well as work with various projects to help bring our retail products more mobile friendly (ie. local listings, product feeds, etc...).

Just today, I received a news alert about a popular comparison shopping engine PriceGrabber just launched an iPhone application. I'd argue that most ecommerce vendors probably has a product feed sent to PriceGrabber from their online marketing initiative; an application like this will inevitable force an ecommerce vendor to participate the mobile game regardless if they want to or not. This means that if your visitor found your product via PriceGrabber mobile, they will likely click on that product link; what happens next will make or break your mobile user experience. A mobile commerce ready website will redirect that user to a page that is formatted nicely to an iPhones screensize while an ecommerce site w/o mobile support will force that user to render the full website onto a small screen. Since PriceGrabber by nature is a "comparison" shopping channel, you should either get with a mobile program or hope your competitors haven't gotten around to it. In the same fashion, Google has been pretty much porting all of its search related products onto mobile (natural search, maps/listings, product search, news, images, etc...). Same goes to the some of the more aggressive coupon/affiliate marketing folks who's brought their services to mobile for online marketers (see my review "Affiliate & Coupon Sites Invade Mobile Experience"

As we approach to an exciting new year, now is a good time for every marketer to start thinking about a tangible mobile strategy.