Browsing via mobile devices grew by 148% worldwide last year and for retailers and publishers, this represents an opportunity to engage with customers and increase revenues. The new generation of handheld devices, led by the iPhone, has dramatically improved the quality of web browsing but to date many companies are not taking advantage of this new opportunity.

Many major UK retailers and brands are yet to embrace mobile ecommerce and premium brands, such as Burberry and Conran have still not even developed a basic mobile-friendly site. The result of this is user frustration even for a mundane task such as trying to find a store location on a handheld device (let lone make a purchase). John Lewis & ASOS amongst others have created a sub domain (m.domain) which supports their initial mobile offering and these sites do deliver decent user experience and functionality.

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Over the last 12 months we have been keeping a close watch on the smart phone market and noticed that as their volumes have been steadily increasing and the technology getting more robust, the share of mobile traffic to website has been rising and rising.

While this percentage of mobile traffic to websites is still relatively small compared to users coming from PCs  it is still a decent volume, growing and in most cases not being channelled into a measurable response.

Portable devices with web capability and large screens have been around for quite some time and online companies’ understanding of user behavior using these devices is quite good.

Smartphones however are quite new and bring new challenges that companies have to deal     with. The most important of these can be summarized as the follows:

1. The size of the screen is small and a regular website needs quite a bit of scrolling and magnification to be read
2. The keypad is small and typing more strenuous
3. Mobiles users are typically on the move and have their attention constantly diverted. The information they need is spontaneous and want it quickly without shuffling through too much data

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