The new site offers features such as finger friendly zones, single-page checkout and the ability to use store gift cards for purchases. The mobile site was created using UniteU Technologies’ new mobile commerce service called Mobile Express.

“There were a lot of challenges in actually transitioning the experience from a fairly complex Web site to a mobile site,” said Soumen Das, CEO of Unite U Technologies, Pittsford, NY.

“Buying golf clubs is a difficult purchase because you have a product with five or six different attributes and trying to display that so shoppers know what they are getting is a challenge in mobile,” he said.

Golf Galaxy is a golf specialty retail store owned and operated by Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Finger friendly zones
UniteU Technologies has been managing Golf Galaxy’s main ecommerce site for a few years. The company used its new mobile service, Mobile Express, to build the retailer’s new mobile site.

One the mobile site, the shopping experience has been simplified so that users get to product selection within two taps. At the same time, UniteU looked to insure that users can effectively purchase complex products such as golf clubs, which have multiple attributes.

On the homepage of the site, users see brand content and a couple of key categories on the top. There is also an area for promotional messages.

When users want to tap on an item or promotion on the mobile site, UniteU created finger-friendly zones.

“A lot of mobile sites have hyperlinks but we found that people have to hit them three or four times before they are activated, which is why we made the links into zones where users can tap” Mr. Das said.

The product pages include the price, a buy button and the product.

“You should see actionable things that are very obvious to you when you get to a product page – you don’t want to have scroll down to find a buy button,” Mr. Das said.

The shopping cart has shipping estimators built-in and allows users to pay for an item using a store gift card.

UniteU worked on shortening the checkout process down to one page for mobile.

“We normally recommend a two- to three-step checkout process but for mobile, we felt we could do it in a single page for mobile,” Mr. Das said.

Mobile traffic
UniteU developed Mobile Express after its analysis showed that a number of the merchants using its ecommerce platform are seeing up to 10 percent of their site traffic coming from the mobile channel.

Because Mobile Express is integrated with Connected Commerce, merchants can leverage the ecommerce platform’s tools for content management, product management and marketing in mobile.

This means brands such as Golf Galaxy can use one content management system for their mobile and ecommerce sites and take promotional content for the ecommerce site and automatically have it available on the mobile platform.

Mobile Express features include auto redirecting so that emails or PPC links to products or searches are automatically presented with the best format for the right device and browser.

In addition to Golf Galaxy, Forplay Catalog went live with a mobile site at the beginning of October on Mobile Express.

“Merchants are under extreme pressure to respond to the expanding demands of mobile,” Mr. Das said.

“The fact that we can provide them with a cost efficient mcommerce solution that’s fully PCI compliant and ensures a high quality presentation of their brand, without impacting or adding to their operational management challenges, is of high value,” he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York