In fact in the US next year, it’s expected that 1% of all transactions will occur from a mobile phone. So many retailers are looking at growing their mobile commerce strategies and are not sure whether they should build a mobile optimized website or whether in fact they should build dedicated apps for the different devices like iPhone and Blackberry and Android.
iTunes became the first widely popular and successful Application Store. Since then, many other vendors have joined the gold rush. I write this blog post on the flight from Barcelona after spending a week at the Mobile World Congress, which is the biggest annual mobile exhibition and conference. This year it also included an event inside the event – Application Planet (an exhibition dedicated to mobile applications).
As I was wandering through the exhibition halls, it became apparent how popular the concept of the Application Store is.
The main goal of an App Store is to increase the attractiveness of a hardware or software platform to end users by engaging third party developers to increase platform capabilities.
Most of the current App Stores have been created either by a hardware manufacturer (Apple, Intel, Samsung, LG) or a wireless network operator (Orange, Verizon Wireless, China Mobile).
In the spirit of the Winter Olympic games that ended last week, I would like to talk about the “winner” of the final A/B experiment we did for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. We already achieved significant improvement with help of previous tests on the checkout process, product details page, and home page. So, shortly before Games time, in collaboration with Wider Funnel, we underwent our fourth A/B experiment on product list page template to take a last stab at conversion optimization.
Testing the Product List Page
The image below is the control version:
We looked at our previous tests and after several hypotheses and investigations we produced two alternative variations with following changes:
JavaScript can transform an otherwise static navigation menu into a feature-rich and interactive user interface that is both pleasing to use and helpful. But, if poorly executed JavaScript can also hide content from search engines, making a site harder to find, which in turn can be devastating for site traffic.
The difference between an effective JavaScript menu—that helps visitors easily navigate the site and helps search engine spiders index it—and one that hides content can be as simple as how the JavaScript is written and implemented. So why is this the case?
JavaScript Is A Client-Side Language
As you probably know, JavaScript is an object-based scripting language that primarily runs in the client, which is typically a web browser. Because the heavy lifting is done on the client-side, JavaScript can add a level of interactively that is often hard to match with other scripting languages or programming choices—even updating a page’s content right in the client. It is for this very reason that asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) has become so popular in the past couple of years.
But being a client-side language also means that it is possible to write JavaScript in such a way that search engine spiders, which are typically very-basic clients, cannot interpret the script or find the content and links it includes.
When JavaScript Goes Bad
For example, here is a short bit of code that will produce a super simple HTML page, which is completely invisible to most search engine spiders.
February was a short month, but there was no shortage of great articles popping up around the blogosphere. Blogger’s Digest is Get Elastic’s monthly roundup of can’t miss posts from Linda’s RSS reader.
Not one, but two of our Elastic Path software developers sent me a link to this fascinating case study by Luke Wroblewski: “Mad Libs” Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%. Dare to give it a try on your own site?
Gmail is really stepping up its bells-and-whistles. One innovation is Enhanced Email which allows the recipient to browse products within the message. Sears is already taking it for a test drive. Another new feature allows YouTube video to be played within Gmail. Mark Brownlow reports how it works and explains the hope and the hype of it for retail email marketers.
iTunes became the first widely popular and successful Application Store. Since then, many other vendors have joined the gold rush. I write this blog post on the flight from Barcelona after spending a week at the Mobile World Congress, which is the biggest annual mobile exhibition and conference. This year it also included an event inside the event – Application Planet (an exhibition dedicated to mobile applications).
In the spirit of the Winter Olympic games that ended last week, I would like to talk about the “winner” of the final A/B experiment we did for the 
JavaScript can transform an otherwise static navigation menu into a feature-rich and interactive user interface that is both pleasing to use and helpful. But, if poorly executed JavaScript can also hide content from search engines, making a site harder to find, which in turn can be devastating for site traffic.
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