One way to assess your mobile strategy, today
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by Mike Ober
Friday, August 6th, 2010
For someone in the tech industry, I’m not the type that stays on top of all the latest gadgets. You will never find me standing in line for an iPhone, iPad, iPod… thanks, but “I”Pass. I carry my… rather, my BlackBerry carries me. And that’s enough. Except, since helping merchants be successful in ecommerce is my job, I can’t ignore the dozens of stories every day about mobile commerce. I get it. It’s here to stay and it is changing our lives.
In my opinion, the business question for non-brand name merchants is this. How much time should you invest in mobile today?
I recently had a Twitter conversation on the topic of mobile commerce (read the history) with @AllWebPromotion, a member of the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions developer network. We agreed that for now, the time investment to do mobile commerce properly, for non-brand name merchants, may be better spent on other low-hanging fruit (such as simple changes to help grow conversion rates). @MattLedford later sent me a direct message that said “do you also advocate not optimizing for major browsers?” Good point, great point actually.
So with that, allow me to share a report from Yahoo! Web Analytics that shows you the impact of mobile on your business today. Using this information, you will be able to factor hard metrics about your current business in this decision-making process.
Yahoo! Store, Merchant Solutions Standard, and Merchant Solutions Professional users should log into their Yahoo! Web Analytics accounts.
As shown below, go to Reports > Operating Systems.
Here we see that “mobile” accounts for less than 1.5% of all visits. Let’s customize this report and add in a revenue contribution dimension. Go to the toolbar at the top of the page (looks like this):
Select Customize Report then click > Metrics > Sales: Drag “Revenue Participation” to the metrics box and click Show Report.
With this added revenue dimension, you can now make an educated decision about the priority for mobile in your business today. I stress “today”, because as I said earlier, mobile is here to stay. This means that over time, you should expect to see an organic increase in mobile traffic to your site.
POLL? So, what’s your take? Is mobile just buzz or is it shaking up e-commerce today? Have your say by answering the Yahoo! Store Blog poll question (located on the blog’s home page), or by leaving a comment on this post.
Here at Yahoo! Small Business, we’re already getting ahead of the curve for you by partnering with Unbound Commerce in a free market trial for Yahoo! merchants. If you are considering a mobile strategy as a near-term priority, this is a great opportunity to get ahead of curve with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and Unbound Commerce.
Michael Ober
Yahoo! Small Business
Follow @YSmallBusiness on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook
Comments
Mike: Companies who have launched mobile sites show a dramatic increase in mobile traffic. Finish Line mobile traffic jumped from 2% of total site traffic to 9% in just a couple of months and K&L Wines went from <1% of total to 10% after 5 months. (Neither did any marketing to generate mobile traffic.)
The lesson here is that traffic & revenue reports for your existing site grossly underestimates the latent demand from mobile customers. Which makes sense: if you don't have a mobile-optimized site, you can’t expect to get many mobile customers.
@Frank — It is true that web development tools will increasingly provide better support for mobile users, but mobile sites are not a fad.
1) Good mobile sites shouldn’t simply be a mini-site. They should have all the products and (most of) the functionality of the main site.
2) BUT, they do need to be formatted for the smaller screen. Users don’t want a lot of pinching & scrolling and data show they tend to bounce away from those sites pretty quickly.
3) AND a well-designed mobile site isn’t just smaller pages, but also reflects the most likely uses that mobile customers need. Face it: if a buyer had easy access to a desktop computer, they’d probably use that instead of a mobile. So, mobile sites are not typically used from the home or office — instead, are used from coffee shops and friendly gatherings and while commuting. The retailer’s site is not optimized for these use cases; the mobile site needs to be.
@Keith, very good points and spot on. If you haven’t checked out Yahoo mcommerce partner don’t waste your time. This has got to be the worst mobile implantation I have ever seen. Every one of their sites look identical and do not scale up or down for different screen sizes. Unbound sites look particularly bad on ipads and require basically the same amount effort to use as a regular site.
Comment by David — October 26, 2010 @ 4:45 pm
@David,
I wanted to respond to your comments about Unbound Commerce (if that’s who you’re referring to), as I’m from Unbound. 
1) You state that all “sites look identical.”
All sites have unique look & feel & branding. They do share a common layout at this time, which is one of the ways we could make it so cost-effective.
Some of our customers have asked for more design options and in November we will be providing Custom Templates, which will provide the ability for unique page layouts. We already have our first customer signed up for this feature.
2) Unbound’s service absolutely does scale up & down for different screen sizes. I’m now looking at Blair Candy on an HTC EVO (bigger screen than an iPhone) and a Blackberry Pearl (very small screen); the site looks great! If you are experiencing a problem with some particular device, please let us know. QA never stops. support@unboundcommerce.com
3) No support for iPad. Absolutely right. We intentionally focus on small-screen, mobile devices that are carried everywhere. iPads are not currently among our supported devices because most companies find that their main site presents very well on an iPad-sized screen. (Flash support being another matter.) Our core techology could, however, deliver an iPad format, and we’d be happy to do that on a custom basis for any merchants who wants it.
Thanks for your interest in mobile!
@Frank What you say is true when you have an iPhone with a small screen and not accepting flsh, I have an Android with the biggest screen on the market and I can tell you that it is very cool to read the news on it, as much as with a real paper!
Mobile websites are just starting…
Comment by PDF Dev — July 18, 2011 @ 4:07 am
I hope that Yahoo will invest in mobile site templates, their seems to be quite a few eCommerce providers doing this, and i now have about 14 – 17% of my visitors coming from mobile. unboundcommerce.com seems to be a solution, maybe their prices will recede in the near future.
Comment by Byron — February 26, 2012 @ 9:18 pm
Mobile sites are a fad, they will fade out in a few years. I am not saying that mobile buying and browsing is going to die but more and more smart phone will support full browser pages and customer will want to see that wonderful design the store/site owner paid for.
Comment by Frank — August 6, 2010 @ 2:48 pm