Today, about a quarter of the websites available on the internet are considered mobile friendly. These mobile friendly sites are usually shopping and services sites, a category that includes retail sites, banks, to shopping assistants and real estate sites. A research concludes that only 10 percent of retails sites are fully available for mobile use. This means that the sites are optimized for mobile use with commerce capabilities, or have dedicated mobile app.
With businesses on the mobile web are not quite up to its potential, mobile shopping experience is still largely an app-driven proposition. Third-party applications can handily aggregate product information, availability and pricing. And individual retailer applications can highlight a store's offerings, special deals, locations and special deals. Most of these applications also shave specialized functionality and interaction.
Top e-commerce like eBay which made did $600 million through mobile channel in 2009, expects the amount to increase exponentially in 2012. Amazon have mastered the mobile experience through their apps, delivering a high degree of usability, the right feature set, and acceptable performance. Now other businesses with big names are trying to catch up with its success.
With the massive wired networks on the internet, information can be sent and received at a fraction of time. With the world today engulfed in a massive usage of mobile devices, the internet is already in many people's hand. To gain the most possibility of potential customers, e-commerce businesses have invested in many of forms concerning mobile technology. One of them is the point-of-sale technology necessary to scan mobile barcodes at the cash registers in all of their stores, opening up new levels of functionality and convenience for the consumer. Shoppers can receive localized coupons via SMS, and then have those coupons scanned right off their phones at checkout. Targeted customers can also manage and use their gift cards right from their mobile phones.
Some businesses now allow customers to leave their gift cards behind when they shop. They have also rolled out mobile gift card payment capability to all of its stores. The mobile card app users can check and reload their balances via the app on their phone or online, and then use the app to pay for further purchasing.
Others have assembled a team to accelerate their e-commerce efforts, including location-aware mobile apps that make product recommendations based on locale, like offering products specific to a store's physical location. These businesses create mobile apps that will push promotions out to customers when they come in the store, as well as deliver product info, reviews and pricing when customers scan barcodes with their phone's camera.
These advantages have gotten more efficient since information based on the customers' payment, purchase, types of products that interest them can be collected by these apps. With these information, businesses can "push" advertisements about their products or their partners' that interest their customers to further increase their sales.
Apps only work on the phones they are designed for. Mobile websites, on the other hand, can be designed to work on any device with a web browser. In fact, the iPhone, BlackBerry, Google's Android phones and other smartphones support an open source framework. A business that have interests in mass market appeal for its content, they are usually more into mobile websites. While others that are interested in reaching a niche market represented by usage of a particular device and operating system, mobile apps are usually their choice of promotion.
According to Admob, smartphones accounts for close to 50 percent of all mobile web traffic. About 330 million high-end smartphone users, 50 percent have Apple's iPhones and iPads, 24 percent have Google's Android mobile products, 18 percent have Symbian smartphones and 4 percent have RIM's BlackBerrys. The numbers mentioned points out that the usage of the internet on mobile is popular and will be much more popular in the future. Many different sources suggests that web on mobile will be the dominant channel in the near future. Google have stated that desktop web will soon be irrelevant.
The ways to spread the words are getting more efficient and less costly since technology has been implemented. More and more businesses are getting themselves into the World Wide Web, and some are taking their steps ahead of other competitors by creating a mobile friendly app for promotional purposes. Although the effectiveness and usage is now potentially available in more developed countries, the less developed and developing countries are catching up fast as mobile demand is increasing in a rapid state.