Tag: mobile commerce site

Mobile commerce website “rules” may not be necessary for success

| July 25, 2014

Barnes & Noble’s smartphone friendly site does everything wrong but has managed to get it right.

Even though Barnes & Noble has done virtually everything wrong when it comes to the typically accepted guidelines for ensuring success in mobile commerce, the smartphone friendly site still seems to be bringing in a comfortably high success rate.

The m-commerce website has a heavy page weight, it loads slowly, and it contains far too many page elements.

The mobile commerce site for the number 41 company in the Internet Retailer Mobile 500 essentially breaks all of the rules when it comes to the recommendations that have been made by Keynote, a highly respected firm in this area. And yet, despite its failing to use the best practices for its overall page construction and for its performance, it is doing quite well. According to Keynote’s Matthew Agnoli, “The Barnes & Noble mobile home page is more than twice as slow as any of the other top five sites, as well as more than double the amount of content and is much larger in size.”

Still, the site still ranked as number 5 on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.

Mobile Commerce - RulesThis was for the week that ended on July 13. According to Agnoli, the one strong point of the m-commerce site that raised it above many others was that it held to a tremendous success rate, which was 99.35 percent. For that week, the average success rate for all of the sites on the index had been 97.96 percent, so clearly Barnes & Noble’s website performed notably better.

That said, success rate enough may not be adequate for the site to be able to hold its position among the top 5 on the list. If other sites manage to bring their own success rates higher, then Barnes & Noble could find its rank plummeting rather quickly. Agnoli pointed out that “A site needs to be both reliable and fast to ensure high customer satisfaction and to keep customers returning.”

Agnoli recommended that the Barnes & Noble mobile commerce site make a number of changes in order to improve the site’s performance and speed it up, to make it much more appealing to consumers.

Mobile commerce boosted by “What’s Hot” at Deb Shops

| July 19, 2013

The retailer saw a boost in its revenue by 170 percent following the addition of this site feature.

A new “What’s Hot” feature on the Deb Shops website is proving to be extremely successful in mobile commerce as using the button shows which products are trending on Facebook and Pinterest.

For many teens, knowing which types of clothing are hot and which ones are not are an important priority.

When Deb Shops took that into account by adding the “What’s Hot” button on its mobile commerce website, it made a considerable impact on its revenues. In fact, according to David Cost, the company’s president of e-commerce and digital marketing, when compared to the shoppers who do not use that button, those who do use it are 20 percent more likely to place an item into their shopping carts. This has brought about an increase in revenue by 170 percent.

This has been an extremely meaningful mobile commerce strategy for the retailer.

Mobile Commerce - Deb ShopsCost explained that “For a retailer like us that has a very broad product offering, to get customers quickly to relevant products is important, especially on a mobile device.” The retailer currently has over 30,000 products available for sale in its catalog online, and over mobile commerce.

Deb Shops first opened its mobile commerce website in April 2012, added Cost. Since that time, the traffic from smartphone users has exploded. By the end of 2011, it was making up 15 percent of the total web traffic to the site. A year after that, it had grown to 40 percent. Today, it has reached over 50 percent of the site’s traffic.

This convinced the retailer to redesign its mobile commerce website, placing a greater focus on improvements to the navigation and search features of the site. BloomReach Corp was the technology chosen by the retailer for this purpose. That company provides online hosted software that draws all of the information about the products that are being posted and talked about by consumers over Facebook and Pinterest from Deb Shops and posts it for shoppers to be able to view for themselves.