Mobile Volusion Gets a Boost With iVoloo 2.0
We loooove our iPhones. We’re aware of the stereotypes. We’ve heard the haters and the trolls. We don’t care. Our love is pure and magical and could never be diminished by the nattering nabobs of negativism (we so rarely get to quote Spiro Agnew).
The above-mentioned deep love was a big part of the reason that we introduced iVoloo – the first iPhone friendly Volusion store, back in July of 2008. Back in those days (it seems so long ago), iVoloo was a novelty. We developed it for a client who sells iPhone accessories, then (drunk with iPhone affection) decided to offer it to the Volusion community at large. In all honesty, back then, the need for iVoloo was debatable. There were absolutely excellent reasons to have a mobile-friendly store, but it wasn’t a critical need. Those times have changed.
Do you remember back when the internet was still in its infancy? It wasn’t that uncommon to search for a huge brand name, only to find that they had no web presence at all. You’d just shrug and grab the phone book (remember those?), look up the store and call them to get your questions answered. However, as time went by, an insufficient web presence became harder and harder to tolerate until finally it seemed like a personal affront to go searching for a store online and come up empty. We’ve now reached the point where even the humblest of mom & pop operations are virtually required to have a website, lest they risk the wrath of their constantly-connected consumers. That’s the future of mobile commerce. You can go ahead and ignore it… for now. You can ignore all of the research (here, here and here) that shows that consumers are quickly (very quickly) becoming comfortable with mCommerce. You can frustrate your mobile customers by failing to offer them what they are rapidly coming to expect from their online experience. You can put all of your eggs in your standard site and hope that your customers are tenacious enough to navigate your teeny-weeny little site in search of what they need.
… or, you could get ahead of the curve (and your competition) for less than a thousand bucks. Give us a call. It’ll be easier than you can imagine.
I was with you until the checkout portion of the demo. When that part looks like the rest of the app, i.e. you dont have to pinch zoom to read the text we’re all over it.
Bryan, that’s a fair critique but the cart and checkout pages on Volusion are pretty well locked down for security reasons (which is why there’s so much less design flexibility in those pages). This is an admittedly incremental shift, but a critical one for anyone who’s interested in staying ahead of the mCommerce curve. If the conditions change and we’re able to alter the format of the checkout process we’ll announce it here in the blog… but don’t get caught waiting. The goal is to stay one step ahead of the competition. Perfection would be nice, but more perfect than the next guy is a darn good place to be.
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Ah…I just posted the same comment as Bryan in another post re. iVoloo. I guess a mobile service like mobify.me won’t work with the code/cart lock-down issue. Good stuff though. Way to stay one-step ahead. Now its time to throw some weight around directly w/ Volusion and ask for some cart/code flexability for mobile devices.
I will personally go throw my weight around right now.
[...] us to say it again. We introduced iVoloo (our iPhone-friendly Volusion store) two years ago and we updated it pretty dramatically just last month. All of this was completed independent of Volusion and as a direct result of needs expressed by [...]