Philadelphia Website Design Firm Looking at Mobile Ecommerce Aps

Philadelphia Website Design Firm Looking at Mobile Ecommerce Applications

Last week in Philadelphia, local Philadelphia Website Design representatives and local Magento Ecommerce developers met to discuss the latest and greatest additions to the Magento platform. Especially exciting was the announcement of mobile apps that work for the iPhone.

This is was an important announcement because mobile devices are fast becoming a common thing in our life, and mobile handsets and smart phones are being used as shopping devices. Using a mobile store, customers can conveniently purchase whenever and wherever they want via a streamlined payment process. In fact mobile commerce has been identified as a new retail channel called m-commerce, and Philadelphia Website Design firms will soon be asked to begin building compatible applications.

Magento’s website boasts the following: Welcome to the world’s first mobile commerce platform. With Magento mobile, you can easily create branded, native storefront applications that are deeply integrated with Magento’s market-leading eCommerce platform.

So why the excitement about mobile commerce apps?

Many industry experts predict that mobile is the next “frontier” for commerce. There are two ways that users interact with ecommerce sites on mobile devices: mobile web (browser) apps and native mobile apps. Mobile web apps involve using themes to optimize the store website so that it renders well on phones and mobile devices. Native mobile apps allow users to engage more deeply with ecommerce sites on their mobile devices. Some native mobile applications even allow a user to begin making a purchase, add things into their shopping basket, and finish the purchase from a mobile device. This is becoming an important trend in mobile applications especially since eBay announced that they project $1.5 billion in mobile sales this year.

However the current m-commerce technology is inadequate to meet retailer’s demands, and there is a lack of universal standards. Magento Mobile is one of the first attempts to meet retailer’s needs with native commerce apps for mobile devices, and the meet up with Philadelphia Website Design representatives helped to convey the features of the platform to developers.

Philadelphia website design representatives were quick to point out that native mobile applications are complicated to manage and expensive to build. Magento’s new mobile native application works only for the iPhone now, but it features commerce, customizable themes that include background images and button colors, and integration with your existing ecommerce and merchandizing tools, at affordable prices. And the Magento representative on hand indicated that an Android compatible version of Magento Mobile will soon be released.