.mobi or not .mobi

ecommerce 2 Responses »
Apr 092009

hamlet mobileOkay, that was a pretty lame title, but it’s actually the most clear way to express the question: what criteria or elements need to be in place to justify a mobile version of a website?

I was talking with a friend of mine, who recently got the .mobi version of his company’s domain, but hadn’t done anything with it.  He asked for advice, and I offered up the following crude thumbnail that Internet (not web) information can be broken into three main types:

  1. Transactional snippets of information: flight times, restaurant addresses, bank account info, sports scores, short text email, answers to salient questions.  Mobile phones do very well at this– iphone or not– just about everyone with a phone participates in this type of internet transaction.  If you see it that way, the iphone app store really becomes a collection ot targetted info queries all eye-candied up.
  2. Search-centric information: Any business model that centers around the shear number of stuff for sale/rent/download/sharing is really a search-centric model and not a browsing model.  Amazon, zappos, walmart, piratebay, and wikipedia are all search-centric.  So is Yelp.  Notice how all of these operations are either exploiting a mobile strategy fairly well (half-way), or are likely close to one.
  3. Browsing ecommerce information: anything that is a context-rich window-shopping experience doesn’t do well on a mobile phone.  The screen isn’t big enough, and we don’t have the patience to make the Solomon’s decision of either viewing a stripped down version of the site or spend the time endlessly scrolling around to see the website in it’s original layout.  Etsy, Borders magic shelf, Dell, or other ecommerce sites that are inherently dependent on the web-surfing serendipity of the site won’t do well on a mobile phone– at least not without some major rethinking on what works and what doesn’t.

My friend is in an information-sharing business.  He handles sets up relationships between business partners, and brokers deals where he sees possible matches.  His real strength is the depth of information, but he certainly has plenty of small transaction-level updates that would be more valuable if offered in near real-time.  My advice to him was to look through all the activities he does, find those that are in the first bucket, and go with the .mobi version.

Posted by Dave at 5:43 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Shopping by Proxy

United States, ecommerce 1 Response »
Apr 062009

Times are tough.  Escapism is rising. As with all depressions, movie attendance is up, Hulu actually has a shot at beating Youtube at its own game, and alcohol sales are up, as are random hook-ups.  We can see the trend on TV: two years ago, the prime-time dreck centered around bling and fabulous homes and even more fabulous lives of the fabulous people that live in them.  Now, that same focus on the rich is there, but it’s gotten nasty: they’re being shown as the bunch of back-biting vapid rodents that they are.  I am not going to expand much on that, because you already know your favorite rodent shows that you watch every week.

Here’s the question: spending is down, and escapism is up– do those two factors translate into higher ’shopping by proxy’?  Do you find yourself spending more time online, “researching” products?  Do you use this research time as a methadone substitute to your normal online shopping habit?  My thesis was that page views on shopping sites would be higher, as people spend more time browsing around, but not necessarily buying anything.  So far, my thesis is half-right:

Discounters like ebay and Walmart are up, as is the unstoppable ruthlessly efficient Amazon (which I hate and admire at the same time, like Ash did in the first Alien):
traffic comparison 1

But overall page views are the same, or slightly down.  Page views have steadily declined as site navigation becomes more efficient, and as buyers decrease, less people go through the shopping cart, which also brings down the average– but the point is that people simply aren’t window shopping on the intarwebs like everyone thinks:
compete2.png
Perhaps the time-wasting website traffic is up?  Are we filling our time photoshopping domo-kun and pictures of Kim Jong Il? Nope– flat, with the only gain coming from hulu (likely due to their very expensive ad campaign).

compete3.png
So, what is everyone doing all night?  I hate to postulate, but in the end, I think TeeVee will win the day.  It may come in through our desktops instead of home theatres, but professionally written stories with good-looking people will beat mindless cartoons and witty political banter discussion threads for the vast majority of us.

Posted by Dave at 6:15 pm Tagged with: , , ,
© 2010 Dave Jenkins contact me via twitter @davejenk1ns or via email blog at davejenkins dot com Suffusion WordPress theme by Sayontan Sinha