mobile the death of E-commerce - best solution

[Chris Hadden]

So I have been selling on the internet since Al Gore invented it. I have made a full time living off it. There have been many challenges in the last few years for us. The giant corporations have been working hard to control all. Amazon, ebay, etsy, google holds sway over everything, adwords and all internet advertising soaring in cost. The Chinese are selling directly into the USA from goverment owned and subsidized factories. Do you know they can send a small package to the USA for less then I can send it to my next door neighbor. On top of that they have virtually copied almost every site, spammed every key word. Searching for some of our unique items brings up alibaba who seems to own every phrase with a top rank but yet that product is not on the site....Now comes mobile phones. I have watched these phones start from a small percentage to most recently surpassing our visits from lap tops. This is proving to be a death knell. An examination of actual orders from mobile shows they run about 17% compared to people on a lap top 83%. Also we sell essentially $1.00 items. Mobile orders are all small so the overall average order total is getting lower by the day. My average order used to be $75 now $42. Where does it end? I have to admit ordering on a smart phone is tough. I do not generally do it, nor would I want to try doing it on my web site as it is just a long ordeal difficult to do on something so small. We also seem to get complaints from various phone users about things not working. Hard to pin down.

So on able commerce I use the /mobile site. Only because I thought it was actually better then how the responsive web site looked on a phone. I also didn't want to move to a responsive site which would involve more work. Anyway, the mobile site sucks either way. The interesting thing is I have another web site selling the same items using someone ecommerce software and that site is a responsive site. It preforms the same in terms of numbers. About 60-50% of traffic but 17% orders with low totals.

I would like to hear from others. Is this typical of what you have seen? What about the responsive site vs. /mobile is there a real upside to the switch on ablecommerce? What have other people done to make mobile shopping viable and successful? I appreciate any feedback.

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hi Chris,

You numbers are perfectly normal. You need to read a great document by google about micro-moments to understand how people are utilizing their mobile devices.

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/micromoments/intro.html

Users are out an about and will do research on their mobile devices, but more often than not end up completing the transaction at home on their pc.

[jmestep]

You sound like my son talking about Amazon. He said in jest he was thinking about setting up an electronic office or something in China. With him, it is about half his income so I'm thinking.....hm, maybe you'd better start transitioning to something else. I doubt if those big companies are ever going to do something that would decrease their income. In a way, I guess we are reaping the results of outsourcing manufacturing because I believe some of the knock-offs are created in plants where the real items are made, only in off hours.