Given the
choice, many people would rather view a full-sized e-commerce site on their
smartphone or tablet than a mobile-optimized version scaled to the smaller
screen.
Bill
Siwicki, a managing editor at Internet
Retailer, comments that he discovered this bit of counterintuitive
intelligence by chance. He was browsing an e-commerce site on his phone when a
pop-up offered to switch to the mobile site. His response: “Of course I want
your mobile commerce web site on my iPhone. I don’t want to have to pinch and
zoom and swipe like mad to try to make sense of the huge desktop site on my
small smartphone screen. Are you crazy?”
That’s not
the response most users give, however. Siwicki found that a new study conducted
last October by Retail Systems Research shows more than half of consumers
bypass mobile e-commerce sites to view the full site on their mobile device.
The study didn’t specifically ask consumers why they do this, but an analyst with
the research company told Siwicki that it’s probably because too many mobile
sites have been overly simplified, leaving out too many features and content
that visitors want to access.
Another
reason may be that some consumers are more familiar with the full site and know
just where to go with minimal zooming and swiping on a mobile device.
Either way,
it indicates that many online retailers “who believe they have great mobile
sites actually have more work to do to make shopping mobile-optimized sites on
smartphones more appealing,” Siwicki writes.
