I am not alone…

Read full article at Practical eCommerce

Pamela Hazelton is a senior contributor to Practical eCommerce.

© Pamela Hazelton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Originally published on 2011/05/27.
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Post tags: conversion, Ecommerce, mobile commerce, practical ecommerce, smartphone

Disclaimer: My thoughts on statistics aren’t a secret and I’ve written about how they can fool us. Just the same, Nielsen’s report is interesting in several respects.

According to the report, we spend nearly a third of our time online, with more than 22% of that time devoted to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

More interesting, though, is the company’s findings for mobile device use. According to Nielsen, email is still the most popular activity on smartphones and feature-rich cell phones. I find the results somewhat surprising, mostly because research I’ve done across non-business users leans toward social media being the primary action on smartphones, with a decent number of folk reporting they haven’t even configured email accounts on their mobile devices.

According to Nielsen, we're spending the bulk of our smartphone time composing and receiving emails. But are these findings skewed by the survey of specific types of users? Or are more users not making clear via social networks how much they spend using their devices for social media as opposed to email?

Perhaps a vast number of respondents are business users. This matters not, though, because the simple fact that people are reading and composing email with their devices shows us that email marketing campaigns are still a great way to communicate with current and potential customers. This also means, however, that we need to focus more on making sure the emails being sent are properly rendered across all devices.

The report also tells us what we should already know – people sure like to Tweet and update their Facebook profiles via their smartphone. Actually, the bulk of my online friends upload pics more via smartphones than computers.

Also not surprising is the usage of video sites, like YouTube. Apps make videos load more quickly than surfing mobile sites, and most devices have a means to upload video to the YouTube servers as well.

Overall, the report is pretty compelling in what it covers. While it wouldn’t be wise to simply take the numbers at face value, we also cannot ignore that smartphones are being used to complete many of the same tasks people already do on their desktops. If you had any reservations about  paying more attention to a mobile-friendly site for your online business, this should serve as a reminder that mobile access is a significant part of the “big picture” when it comes to the future of the web.

© Pamela Hazelton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Originally published on 2010/08/31.
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Post tags: email, mobile commerce, smartphone, social media, statistics, Technology

But, consider this: Amazon topped $1 billion in mobile sales in the last 12 months alone. $1 billion – that’s a nice big chunk of change. What we don’t know is how many of those sales occurred due to lack of mobile shopping sites in general. After all, if there’s only one mobile site you can find that carries a product you need to order while riding the train, what choice do you have?

The way I see it, if you aren’t investing in your company’s future, you might as well be prepared to pass up a potentially big market. Sure, it will be several years before mobile shopping will gain a hefty percentage of total eCommerce sales, but the early adopters in the game stand to do far better than those who wait until the visual proof is there.

© Pamela Hazelton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Originally published on 2010/07/23.
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Post tags: Ecommerce, mobile commerce

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© Pamela Hazelton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Originally published on 2010/07/02.
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With consumers upgrading from regular cell phones to mobile devices running off webOS, Android and Apple’s iPhone platform, the question shouldn’t be if small business commerce sites should be implementing mobile versions, but when.

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© Pamela Hazelton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Originally published on 2010/06/07.
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Post tags: Ecommerce, mobile commerce, shopability, webOS