In a recent Google Analytics blog post, “Back-to-Basics: How much mobile traffic do you get?”, author Alden DeSoto, reported that monthly mobile traffic to googlestore.com over the past 2 years rose dramatically:
There were 277 visits in Sep, 2008. But in July of 2010, there were over 13,000 visits! Given this kind of growth, it makes sense for many businesses to set up a mobile device-friendly site.
Of course, our response to this post is that it just reinforces the fact that ecommerce merchants need to take serious notice of their mobile traffic to determine whether they should invest in a mobile store solution. We, at FastPivot, are seeing significant increases in mobile traffic to our custom Yahoo! Stores clients.
Many Yahoo! merchants have already made the leap to mobile, which should make a measurable difference in their mobile conversion rates. Although mobile traffic in general is picking up, mobile shoppers that land on a standard ecommerce store aren’t likely to stay long enough to convert because browsing through a regular sized ecommerce store is very difficult from a 3 inch touch screen.
Thus, without a mobile store, which makes navigation simple from a smart phone, much of that mobile traffic is never converted.
See this Youtube “Viewing a regular ecommerce store from mobile device“.
