{"id":383696,"date":"2010-03-03T09:05:51","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T14:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\/?p=58828"},"modified":"2010-03-03T09:05:51","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T14:05:51","slug":"ka-ching-shopping-drives-the-touch-friendly-mobile-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/383696","title":{"rendered":"Ka-Ching! Shopping Drives the Touch-Friendly Mobile Web"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/starbucks-mobile-site-thumb.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\"  style=\"border: 1px solid black;\" title=\"starbucks-mobile-site-thumb\" src=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/starbucks-mobile-site-thumb.png?w=210&#038;h=140\" alt=\"\" width=\"210\" height=\"140\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-58839\" \/><\/a>Are you tapping your way around the web these days? More of us are, thanks to touch-friendly devices and web pages optimized for them. But what types of sites and services are the most available for caressing? I would have thought news or blogs to take top billing, but boy was I wrong. According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.taptu.com\">Taptu<\/a>, creator of a touch-friendly search engine, my money should have been on shopping and e-commerce. Based on Taptu&#8217;s Touch Friendly Web Report for February, we&#8217;re able to do more shopping with our fingers than anything else on the mobile web.<\/p>\n<p>Taptu built the results from a scan over 113 million sites and consider 334,800 of them to be &#8220;touch-friendly.&#8221; Shopping and services comprise 24.8% of that overall pool &#8212; nearly one in every four touch-friendly sites is a place to buy goods or services. How did my picks of news and blogs do? Only 3.3% and 1.3% of those touch-friendly mobile sites were news or weblogs. Good thing I didn&#8217;t place money on my picks.<\/p>\n<div id=\"inline-related-posts-58828\" class=\"widget inline-related-posts alignleft clearfix\">\n<div class=\"widget-wrap\">\n<div class=\"widget-title-wrap clearfix\">\n<h2 class=\"widget-title\">More on <span><a class=\"category-link\" href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\/topic\/web\" title=\"Web\">Web<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<ul class=\"inline-related-posts\">\n<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-related-posts-article\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\/2010\/03\/02\/fast-gmail-windows\/\">Gmail Pop-Out Windows Get Super Fast (Unless You Run&nbsp;IE)<\/a><\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"brand-icon jk-run\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\" title=\"Visit: jkOnTheRun - This is a description.\">Gadget Gurus<\/a><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-related-posts-article\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\/2010\/02\/24\/lexmark-partners-with-evernote-scan-docs-to-the-cloud\/\">Lexmark Partners with Evernote &#8212; Scan Docs to the&nbsp;Cloud<\/a><\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"brand-icon jk-run\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\" title=\"Visit: jkOnTheRun - This is a description.\">Gadget Gurus<\/a><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-related-posts-article\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\/2010\/02\/11\/six-useful-extensions-for-google-chrome-on-mac\/\">Six Useful Extensions for Google Chrome on&nbsp;Mac<\/a><\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"brand-icon jk-run\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\" title=\"Visit: jkOnTheRun - This is a description.\">Gadget Gurus<\/a><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-related-posts-article\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\/2010\/02\/11\/mobiletechroundup-197-buzzing-about-swype-and-skyfire\/\">MobileTechRoundup 197 &#8212; Buzzing About Swype and&nbsp;Skyfire<\/a><\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"brand-icon jk-run\"><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.com\" title=\"Visit: jkOnTheRun - This is a description.\">Gadget Gurus<\/a><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<div class=\"widget-bottom clearfix\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I wouldn&#8217;t have thought too much about this topic, but now that I&#8217;ve read the report, I recall a recent frustration with what I&#8217;d consider a touch-friendly site in the e-commerce world. I was having issues with a third-party Starbucks app on my Android handset and couldn&#8217;t retrieve the balance on my Starbucks card. Thinking I was smart, I just tapped my way over to the Starbucks site in my browser. Then I noticed how limited the mobile site was &#8212; basically I could find a Starbucks location, but I couldn&#8217;t check my card balance. That&#8217;s a function available on the less-touch-friendly desktop site but not on the mobile site. And although it&#8217;s not Starbucks&#8217; fault, I couldn&#8217;t get the full site to open on my phone &#8212; the browser kept returning to the less functional mobile site.<\/p>\n<p>Now that I look through the Taptu report and see examples of true touch-friendly sites, I&#8217;m inclined to define Starbucks as only having a mobile site, and not a touch-friendly one. Yes, I can tap on the site, but that&#8217;s simply an\u00a0inherent\u00a0function of my phone and its browser. The examples that Taptu offers show rich interfaces that look more like native apps &#8212; not tappable hyperlinks, circa-2001. Here&#8217;s a sample from the report to illustrate &#8212; aren&#8217;t these appealing touch-friendly apps when compared to my example? I&#8217;m not trying to pick on Starbucks here, it&#8217;s simply a recent example. And this might even give the company some constructive criticism to enhance their mobile site.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/taptu-mobile-sites.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\"  title=\"taptu-mobile-sites\" src=\"http:\/\/jkontherun.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/taptu-mobile-sites.jpg?w=604&#038;h=260\" alt=\"\" width=\"604\" height=\"260\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-58836\" \/><\/a>A few years ago, having a mobile site was considered forward-thinking. But <a href=\"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/2010\/03\/03\/the-importance-of-touch-on-the-mobile-web\/\">as Colin notes at GigaOm<\/a>, web developers of today <strong>have<\/strong> to consider how and where potential customers will access the sites. At some point in the near future, non-friendly sites for touch devices could mean no sale, which defeats the very purpose of expanding sales opportunities across hundreds of millions of handsets.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/taptu.com\/metrics\/\">Taptu&#8217;s February report is freely available<\/a> and is the second in a monthly series focused on the touchable web. After you give it a read, let me know if the results surprise you. More importantly though &#8212; what&#8217;s your stance on third-party apps vs well designed web sites for e-commerce and content consumption? Have you ever taken your business elsewhere because of a poorly designed mobile e-commerce or service site?<\/p>\n<p><em>Image courtesy of Taptu<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req\u2019d):<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pro.gigaom.com\/2009\/09\/mobile-sites-show-little-improvement\/\">Mobile Sites Show Little Improvement<\/a><\/p>\n<p>  <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/gocomments\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/comments\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\" \/><\/a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/godelicious\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/delicious\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\" \/><\/a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/gostumble\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/stumble\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\" \/><\/a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/godigg\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/digg\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\" \/><\/a> <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/goreddit\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/reddit\/jkontherun.wordpress.com\/58828\/\" \/><\/a> <img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/stats.wordpress.com\/b.gif?host=jkontherun.com&#038;blog=4479943&#038;post=58828&#038;subd=jkontherun&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are you tapping your way around the web these days? More of us are, thanks to touch-friendly devices and web pages optimized for them. But what types of sites and services are the most available for caressing? I would have thought news or blogs to take top billing, but boy was I wrong. According to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/670"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}