Kony study: Companies give high priority for offering mobile web

Kony Solutions, did a survey in 119 large corporations and it inferred that 61% of the respondents planned to incorporate sales and commerce capabilities into mobile offerings.

The companies also helped in giving an insight apart from the sales and commerce functions.

Informational resources were 75% of the whole, brand awareness was 61%, and customer service and support was 56%-were components of their mobile strategy.

There were also clear cut strategies that were demonstrated by various segments. For example, retail companies clearly were the respondents who chose mobile commerce capabilities, and was at the higher end at 82%, travel and hospitality businesses came in second with 58%.

The study also highlighted that companies consider offering a mobile website to be the highest priority. Around 73% of the respondents agreed to this. Downloadble mobile applications came a close second and messaging as a VAS was another close contender.

Raj Koneru, founder and CEO of Kony Solutions says, "It's clear that the mobile landscape has created a unique, complicated and costly problem for consumer-centric organizations; however, it also offers lucrative opportunities."

He also adds, "Companies are unclear as to how best to balance the cost of developing and deploying mobile offerings across multiple devices with the need to reach the widest range of consumers. Consumers facing businesses need to implement mobile solutions in the near term or risk disengagement. Additionally, the potential revenue stream and brand awareness from mobile offerings is too great to be ignored."

Importance of usability in e-commerce websites

According to the “Revolutionizing Website Design” report from digital marketing agency Oneupweb, Web users expect a lot from shopping sites, but their focus is on the fundamentals that facilitate purchasing.

Clearly presented pricing and shipping information, for example, is the most important feature of e-commerce sites, followed by indications of credibility and trustworthiness. Visual appeal and functionality like cost calculators and search were also relatively important. But advanced features such as live chat and social hooks were important to but a small minority of respondents.

While Facebook “like” buttons may facilitate viral sharing of product pages, online retailers concerned with conversion rates, failed transactions and shopping cart abandonment will have other priorities.

Oneupweb found those problems were relatively big ones for e-commerce sites. Task completion failure rates were higher than on travel sites, business-to-business properties or higher-education Websites.

Further, while e-commerce abandonment rates were relatively low compared to the other categories studied, their failure rates were highest.

iPerceptions found in 2009 that while overall task completion rates on e-commerce sites were high, they dropped significantly when visitors went to the sites specifically to buy. Those just looking to learn about products were better able to accomplish their goals and ended up better satisfied.

Also in 2009, Web performance monitoring firm Gomez reported that just one or two bad experiences could turn online shoppers off forever, making these usability concerns a priority for online retailers.

dotMobi launches goMobi, mobile website creation tool

dotMobi, the company behind the “.mobi” domain, unveiled goMobi, an easy to use mobile website creation tool. The company argues that the new solution brings together the breadth of traditional content management systems with the speed and simplicity of mobile website builders. In other words, you don’t need to be an expert in order to create and maintain your (your company’s) mobile website.

Among the cool features included in the solution is the ability to detect website visitor’s mobile phone and serve appropriately formatted content. By default, goMobi produces easy to use, icon-based websites, but there are also options to make further customizations.

For more experienced developers, there’s a “powerful suite of tools” which allows them [developers] to control the automated transformation of desktop website content to mobile-friendly content as well as accessing HTML metatags for site items, along with a mobile/desktop switcher and advanced device detection capabilities.

You can access goMobi’s website from your computer at goMobi.info and at go.mobi on mobile devices.

Mobile web users in China

According to eMarketer there will be more mobile Internet users in China than the entire population of the US by the end of this year.

For your reference, the 2010 estimate of the size of the United States population stands at roughly 310 million people according to Wikipedia, so that’s a whole lot of people browsing the Web from their phones right there.

The report, which you can purchase here, also says the number of mobile Internet users in China will grow fast to reach a staggering 957 million, and that the country will count approximately 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2014.

eMarketer points out that those mobile Internet users do not currently monetize as well as smaller mobile audiences in, say, the States, which means that mobile advertising spending levels in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Web user base. Also, the company highlights another key trend in China, which is that mobile subscriber growth is actually slowing while mobile Internet user growth is accelerating.