Is it time for your winery/wine store to have a mobile website?

Late last year I was looking through one of our customers web analytics, analyzing some sales and browsing patterns and noticed something interesting - someone using an iPhone bought wine on this particular website.

We are hearing more and more about internet usage on smartphones - so is it time to target these mobile visitors? Let's look at some stats:

• Ebay expects to sell $1.5 billion worth of goods through mobile devices in 2010
• Mobile internet traffic is set to grow 400% by 2015 and bandwidth is expected to grow 39 times
• On any given day, 57.8 million Americans access the web via their mobile device
• Worldwide 172.4 million smart phones were sold in 2009.

All of the websites we build work on the iPhone and Android phones, but the experience hasn't been particularly great. Like most traditional websites, when they are viewed on an mobile device it involves a lot of tapping, zooming, and scrolling.

While there are some big numbers in the links above, looking at the wine websites we build, we are only seeing between 2-5% of traffic from mobile devices. However even with these small numbers, I would argue that the time for a mobile site is now - for the following reasons:

• The people who saw the largest successes from social media were the first people in, being early in gives you some first mover advantage.
• Get in early, make mistakes early, and learn while the traffic is still small. Figure out what is working and what isn't working.
• People might not spend a lot of time on your site with their mobile device because the experience isn't great right now. (Try visiting your own site on an iPhone or Android phone - would you want to spend a lot of time on it?) When the experience improves, they will spend more time and interact more - this has been proven.

~~

Today we launched our mobile ecommerce solution. If you have an iPhone or Android Phone visit http://twistedoak.com, http://cuvaison.com or our demo site http://pinewines.com. Let us know what you think of the experience.  I would also like to hear your opinions on mobile websites and mobile commerce.
 

Apr 6, 2010 at 6:30 AM

Permalink

Comments (5)

How's your site search working?

How's your site search working? Are customers frustrated by the results? Do you even track the searches people make and the number of results you return.

This hilarious little video showed up on Future Now's blog last week and explains the problem with most website searches.

Dec 21, 2008 at 10:00 PM

Permalink

Be the first to comment on this post

Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) Vancouver 2008

Last week Friday I went to the Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) held in Vancouver, BC. The topics ranged from SEO, visitor intent tracking, A/B testing, Google Website Optimizer, Social Media, website monetization, CMS systems, web 2.0, community engagement, mobile marketing, conversion optimization, website analytics, email tracking, copywriting and online advertising. The conference has previously been held in New York City, Las Vegas, Montreal, Stockholm, Berlin, and Copenhagen.

There were over 50 speakers from Europe, the United States and Canada coming together to speak at this sold out conference held at the Coast Plaza Hotel. The speakers were from companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Victoria Secret, VanCity, and Aeroplan.

I was having lunch with one of the past presidents from the International Internet Marketing Association (IIMA) and after talking about different CMS option and he asked if I would speak on a panel about CMS for them. I’m looking forward to meeting with IIMA and the other panel members.

I feel there were three main topics that seemed to seep through each topic, SEO, testing and social media. (I’ll put these topics into short bullet points to recap for you).

SEO

• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) are now more important than they ever used to be! 
• Go after long term results not the quick fix ranking jump (Don’t use “Black Hat” tactics like link buying and link sculpting)
• Content is King

Testing

• If you're not testing your website (A/B testing, conversion optimization, landing pages, etc.) then you’re behind the game already.
• Test for visitor intent on your site
• Use your analytics to conquer the “big-dog, little-dog syndrome” (the boss going with his hunch)

Social Media

• Use relevant media to correctly seek out your target market
• Go where your market is, get down on their level
• Be authentic, they will be able to sniff you out if you’re faking it
• Use it for the long term, social media might not pay off short term

Sep 18, 2008 at 6:00 AM

Permalink

Be the first to comment on this post