mShopper, the leader in mobile commerce solutions for retailers, today announced that it has launched an entire suite of APIs that open up its mobile commerce platform to any company wishing to integrate with the company's industry-leading mobile shopping and marketing functionality.

The company's decision to open up its technology accompanied the release of a completely redesigned mStore Dashboard. The Dashboard puts control of an mStore into the retailers' hands, similar to how they manage their online store. Retailers easily choose their mStore URL, integrate their product data, design assets and customize and launch their mStore on any phone with a browser.

The Dashboard also includes easy-to-use tools for merchandising and marketing the mStore, including Hot Deals schedulers, sign-up forms to build a mobile database, abandoned cart reminders, a powerful text-message marketing program, and promotional assets to drive traffic from non-mobile channels.

"Facebook and Twitter proved that an open model is the secret to driving adoption of amazing software," explained mShopper's CEO, David Gould. "By opening up our platform, we've given e-commerce providers the power to easily integrate a customized mobile commerce solution that they can offer their merchants, in time for the holidays."

According to company officials, all of the Dashboard's new features are available for integration. Gould explained: "Your mStore should be built differently than your e-commerce site, but the two should still speak the same language."

Companies can visit www.mShopperAPI.net to integrate their shopping carts with mShopper's APIs for the consumer database, product inventory, shipping costs, design themes, payment types, promotional codes, order processing and SMS marketing.

Gould added: "All of our functionality can now be accessed remotely, allowing partners to easily white-label our solution for their merchants."

The company's VP of Sales, Kathryn Wardell, explained the significance of the move. "Whether you have IT resources at your disposal to customize a mobile solution or just want to use our no-IT-needed option, mShopper now has a solution to help you go mobile quickly and easily," explained Wardell.

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BizDeals (http://www.bizdeals.com), a B2B weekly deal site, today announced its weekly slate of deals for the week for October 4th through 10th. This week, BizDeals features a range of group buying discounts to help small businesses save on business essentials, tools for business growth, and items to reward or recognize deserving employees and customers.

For businesses looking for the perfect way to reward the ones who help make them successful, BizDeals is offering a set of five vouchers for custom image wrap photo books from PhotoBin. A far more lasting way to show appreciation than just a gift card, this deal lets businesses award staff, customers, and colleagues with a way to create their own high-quality hardback photo book. This deal is offered at a price of $75, which is 62% off the retail price of $199.95.

This week's BizDeal from mShopper helps businesses take advantage of the growing mobile phone phenomenon with a free mobile eCommerce website solution for their existing webstore. Users get three months' free usage of an mStore that functions beautifully on all smart phones, as well as two promotional assets for their website, e-newsletter, and social media, and 1,000 free text messages to drive additional traffic. The retail price for this solution is $297, but BizDeals customers get a full 100% off.

BizDeals' third offer this week is from website usability specialist UserTesting. For half off their normal price customers can take advantage of website usability and feedback tools, which provide the fastest, easiest way for small businesses to find out exactly what customers think of their website. Usability testing has never been more affordable. The deal includes three tests for only $58, a 50% savings.

Each week BizDeals seeks to provide unique savings opportunities for small business customers. BizDeals' weekly deals deliver savings on products and services in the categories of Business Essentials, Business Growth, and Rewards & Recognition - the most vital areas where savings can help SMBs grow their businesses more effectively.

BizDeals continues to source great deals from great brands. If you're trying to reach new customers in the small business market and have a product or service that can be delivered nationally, we'd love to hear from you. Click here to learn more about selling on the BizDeals marketplace - Sell on BizDeals.

About BizDeals

Founded in 2010, BizDeals is an innovative B2B group buying site that offers new and exclusive offers to small businesses on a weekly basis. Through BizDeals, small businesses can take advantage of deep discounts on the products and services they really need, offered by the national brands they know and trust. Find us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/BizDeals or follow us on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/bizdeals. For more information or to join the BizDeals network, visit www.bizdeals.com.

mShopper®, a leader in mobile commerce solutions for retailers, today announced a new partnership with MWRC, a cost-effective e-commerce solution for brand name manufacturers and distributors.

"We're very excited to bring mobile commerce to MWRC's impressive roster of retail brands. Our solution works perfectly for companies like MWRC that manage e-commerce for small-to-medium-sized brands," explained mShopper's CEO, David Gould. "Our platform provides more than just a technology that integrates with e-commerce sites. Users receive a full suite of marketing tools that promote their mStore®, convert visitors to sales, and build a loyal database of mobile shoppers."

In the first stage of the partnership, MWRC used mShopper's self-service Mobile Commerce Platform to build customized mStores for six apparel and outdoor sports clients. After the initial rollout, MWRC will launch mStores for the remainder of its 40 clients in time for the holidays, including top brands such as Body Glove, Frankie B, Channel Islands, Gargoyles Eyewear, Anarchy Eyewear, and Foster Grant.

"mShopper allowed us to create feature-packed mStores for our clients with minimal IT or budget required from our clients," commented Jeff Miller, VP Sales & Marketing for MWRC. "We have been looking for a great m-commerce solution for a while. We are very pleased with mShopper. And so are our clients."

Miller continued: "We operate a unique revenue-sharing e-commerce system that eliminates channel conflict for brands, so we especially love how mShopper's solution integrates nicely with our clients' e-commerce sites."

MWRC's clients will each receive a customized mStore with a powerful search engine designed for mobile shopping habits, feature-rich product pages focused on conversion, and a streamlined check-out process integrated with PayPal, Google, and Amazon payment gateways.

Meanwhile, MWRC can use mShopper's Mobile Commerce Dashboard to control the product listing, design and layout, shipping and payment options, and merchandising of their clients' mStores. The Dashboard also provides marketing tools for both current and new shoppers, such as redirect code for mobile phones, promotional assets for web and email, an opt-in loyalty database, and the GetFirstDibs™ text-messaging outreach program.

Gould added: "Top brands and e-commerce providers have been signing up with us at an amazing rate because we cure their 'mobile headache'. We're fast, we're easy, we're platform-agnostic, and our business model is performance-based."

The holiday season screams mobile commerce, according to Computer Geeks, also known as Geeks.com. That is why the computers and accessories e-retailer is preparing to give its m-commerce site a big marketing push, so that shoppers still unaware of its nine-month-old mobile site will know they have a personal shopping assistant in their pocket when on the go during the hectic months of November and December, says Chris Herzog, vice president of e-commerce development at Computer Geeks, No. 244 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

"People are extra busy running around doing things during the holiday season; consequently, the holiday season lends itself to the mobile channel," Herzog says. "In November we'll start promoting the m-commerce site on the e-commerce site, giving it prominent placement there, as well as through our promotional e-mails, text messages, Facebook and Twitter. The message will primarily be about how customers are on the go, in a hurry, traveling, so they can use the site to search for products and hot deals."

Mobile business is booming at Geeks.com. Internet Retailer projects the e-retailer's m-commerce site will generate $934,000 in sales this year. 14% of its total traffic comes from mobile devices, up from 10% just six months ago, the merchant reports. And 20% of the marketing e-mails it routinely sends are opened on mobile devices.

Geeks.com employed mobile commerce technology vendor mShopper to build the m-commerce site. Consumers who type in the standard URL Geeks.com on a mobile device are automatically redirected to the mobile site. The e-retailer launched the site in December 2010. Products sold through the m-commerce site skew mobile themselves, such as notebooks, tablets, smartphones and cellular accessories.

Geeks.com gives most of its home page real estate to an automatic left-to-right scroll of the day's hot deals. It's a feature the merchant says has worked well in e-commerce and that it lends itself to mobile commerce, where consumers like to stay on top of daily deals. While Herzog declines to reveal exact sales numbers, he says the hot deals section of the mobile home page is a solid strategy. "The hot deals/daily deals feature has worked out very well for us," he says.

Herzog says mobile commerce today harkens back to the earliest days of Internet retailing.

"It feels like E-commerce 2.0," he says. "We've been selling online since 1996; we were there at the birth of e-commerce. Mobile commerce today feels a lot like that, making it up as we go. We have some lessons to draw on from previous e-commerce experiences, but there are a lot of things that remain to be seen, so we're testing the waters and seeing where to go."

Vendors that specialize in mobile commerce technology dominated the landscape in the early days of m-commerce. Players like Digby, Unbound Commerce and Usablenet Inc. were the pioneers that trailblazing retailers turned to when going mobile. This was the case for a few years until e-commerce platform vendors realized that m-commerce was not a passing fad and that the burgeoning market offered them a new opportunity. Then the e-commerce vendors like Demandware Inc. and MarketLive Inc. began building m-commerce into their e-commerce packages.

MWRC Internet Sales LLC is the latest e-commerce platform technology provider to go mobile. However, it's doing so by partnering with an m-commerce vendor, mShopper. It opted to partner rather than build because it did not have the time or resources or all the skills in-house necessary to create an m-commerce extension of its e-commerce platform, says Jeff Miller, vice president of sales and marketing at MWRC.

"When we first went down the RFP process two years ago the costs were too high. We wanted to offer our clients an m-commerce store without them having to pay an arm and a leg," Miller explains. "We needed it to work easily from the technical perspective with our system that we built while being able to make a good return on investment for us and our clients. After exploring a few roads with other vendors we decided on mShopper, which met our criteria."

MWRC positions its m-commerce site offering as a bargain, comparing it to other mobile site technologies, namely from m-commerce niche vendors, that it says can cost $20,000 to $100,000, Miller says. MWRC and mShopper charge MWRC clients a one-time $500 set-up fee and take a small percentage cut of each mobile transaction, which they decline to reveal. They also charge a monthly fee ranging from $99 to $999 based on e-commerce site traffic.

MWRC is today launching its first m-commerce site. The site is for its e-commerce client GargoylesEyewear.com, a brand of Foster Grant. It says it will launch six more clients into m-commerce next week and the remainder of its 40 clients by the holidays.

"Part of what we tell clients is you either do it now, or you do it in five years and wish you would have done it now. All the numbers are pointing in the mobile direction," Miller says. "When you see Amazon redesigning their main site with mobile in mind, it should raise your eyebrows."

Holiday shoppers are well equipped this year. With smartphones and tablets, an artillery of apps, mobile coupons, quick-response (QR) and bar code scanning and flash sale websites, they can click-to-buy gifts for everyone on their list with maximum efficiency and savings.

Last year's holiday retail sales were surprisingly positive, particularly in E-commerce where spending was up more than 12 percent, according to comScore. Cyber Monday sales outpaced Black Friday, and surpassed $1 billion for the first time, setting a record for the most online spending in a single day.

Smart devices provided the tools to scan product codes and compare prices and product features at various retailers, both online and brick-and-mortar, putting consumers in control of finding the best value for their money in the down economy. Daily deal websites, such as Groupon and Living Social, and online flash sales from websites such as Gilt, RueLaLa and Hautelook, provided further opportunities for shoppers to seek out high-quality goods at discounted prices.

The E-commerce and mobile shopping trends that resulted in a celebratory end to 2010 continue to flourish in 2011, and are driven by the constant increase of smartphone adoption. According to MobiLens, comScore's mobile research division, 78 million people, about 33 percent of the 234 million U.S. mobile population, used a smartphone to view retail content during the second quarter of 2011, up 8 percent compared to the first quarter.

All Systems Go
As the 2011 holiday retail season quickly approaches, optimizing a mobile strategy is top of mind for many marketers. Ken Barber, vice president of marketing for mShopper, a company that provides mobile commerce solution for retailers, says that one of the most important things a company can do is create a mobile version of its website.

"An optimized mobile website makes life a lot easier for mobile shoppers and can produce conversion rates that are up to 10 times better than a non-mobile-optimized site," says Barber. "A mobile website knows what device a shopper is using and presents the properly formatted site. But it also adjusts for the unique needs of the mobile user. It typically has fewer images so it loads faster, bigger buttons for shoppers on the go, fewer buttons, mobile shoppers need something simple and quick, and requires less data entry — this is tough while moving."

mShopper also provides cart abandonment solutions to reconnect with prospective mobile customers. If shoppers have entered their contact information and then leave without completing their purchase, the retailer is able to contact them automatically by E-mail or text message.

"They can further decide how soon after the abandonment the automatically-generated reminder email will be sent," says Barber. "The reminder E-mail will contain a link that will bring shoppers directly back to the page in the checkout process where they left. This feature is especially important with mobile shoppers who may be trying to complete a purchase but lose reception temporarily." mShopper offers retailers three options for managing product fulfillment.

"We can send the order details directly to their existing E-commerce shopping cart via an API," says Barber. "We can notify the retailer that an order is ready for processing and give them a link to our platform to process it into their E-commerce cart manually. Or we can use our order-processing center to manually place the order into their E-commerce cart. With all three options, the order shows up in their existing order database with a tracking tag that identifies it came from their mobile store."

Optimizing a website for mobile shoppers parallels many of the fundamental marketing tactics of traditional direct response television commercials. The messaging is short, simple and enticing. There's immediacy, compelling offers, and the messages are targeted and tested in various geographies.

Act Now
The As Seen On TV Official App is another avenue to integrate mobile retail into an existing DR campaign. The app is free to download and available on both the Apple iOS and Android OS. It's also free for advertisers to set up their products through. When it launched in October 2010, Brad Feldman, the app's developer, had high expectations that the new DRTV portal would attract marketers looking for an additive revenue stream for their As Seen On TV products. Consumers wouldn't have to remember an 800 number or a Web address. They'd simply click-to-call or click-to-buy an item after viewing it on a commercial or visiting the app directly. "We're not a retail shop," says Feldman. "We're a service for the industry." Feldman says that he built the app for the DR industry as a tool to integrate and test mobile marketing, but quickly learned that consumers expected a robust As Seen On TV retail experience. Consumers liked the concept, but he needs to get more DR marketers to get on board with their products. "Television is so big and makes so much money that when you talk about additional distribution, [some marketers] see it as a very small portion," he says. To help ease the transition, Feldman continued to enhance the app with more features for the consumers and fulfillment logistics for advertisers. Now, when customers using the app click to call, it goes directly to the marketers' customer service center. The app works juts like a call center using the already-existing infrastructure of the marketer — and Feldman has also integrated HTML5 and mobile optimized websites (www.asseenontvinc.com) into his offerings. Whether or not mobile advertising presents a big enough opportunity to invest is up to each marketer to decide, but it's clearly picking up momentum. According to comScore's "State of the Mobile Industry" report, U.S. mobile advertising is projected to reach $2.5 billion by 2014.

Blurring the Lines Smart devices continue to merge the worlds of E-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail. Connecting with users on their smartphones is a compelling way to drive them back into a store. Consumers scan QR and bar codes in a store to seek a better deal online or at a neighboring retailer, but they're also using online research before visiting a store to make a purchase.

According to financial services company Credit Suisse, 87 percent of prospective customers research products online before buying them at a retailer. Brick-and-mortar sales influenced by consumers doing online research will reach $1.1 trillion by 2010, which is about half of all retail sales.

Since consumers are looking at all avenues to find the right products at the right price, marketers need to be present at each stop and looking cohesively at a multi-channel marketing campaign. Amazon and other major online retailers are ramping up their customer service and employing some of the tactics of traditional retail. They use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with consumers directly, answering questions and thanking them for their loyalty. They're also quashing one of the biggest aggravations of shopping online — shipping charges.

According to a comScore survey, 84 percent of consumers stated that free shipping was either somewhat or very important when making a purchase online. With Amazon Prime, consumers pay $79 annually for unlimited two-day shipping. Zazzle, a website where customers make personalized products such as T-shirts, mugs and greeting cards, recently introduced Zazzle Black, a membership program that offers unlimited free shipping on qualified products for $9.95 a year, or unlimited two-day free shipping for $39.95 a year. Zappos, the shoe and apparel online retailer that notoriously built its brand on making people happy, offers free shipping on purchases and returns in addition to live help on its website.

The free shipping trend is also influencing return policies on flash sale websites. Gilt offers its customers free return shipping with a refund to the original form of payment. Hautelook recently introduced free return shipping for orders refunded with Hautelook credit.

Friendly Recommendations Seeking out retailers and local businesses on a smartphone is often influenced by personal recommendations by friends, and friends of friends, on social networks. According to Nielsen, Americans spent nearly a quarter of their time online on social networks and blogs, a 15.8-percent increase from a year ago. Social networks are the No. 1 destination, up 43 percent in June compared to June 2010.

The location media company, Where, helps users to connect with local business through its Where app, which has more than 4 million users. "The application is really about helping consumers find great local places," says Dan Gilmartin, vice president of sales and marketing. "It's a Pandora for places or a Netflix for places. It gets to learn about you, your interests, your likes and your dislikes and makes recommendations on where to go based on that information." The app is powered by a relevancy engine and an algorithm that also weights social recommendations in order to surface places that a user might like based on what people with similar interests liked too. The relevancy engine also powers Where Ads, a mobile ad network that reaches 53 million consumers across the United States. Developers plug in Where Ads in order to serve up relevant adds to monetize their apps. "The ad network takes into account a lot of that similar information about what you're engaging with, different businesses and place pages that you may visit and uses that information to deliver relevant advertisers to you when you're using the application," Gilmartin says.

There are about 400 publishers plugged into the performance-based ad network. Performance is broken down into two parts: A primary click is when a user clicks on an ad to view a business page, and a secondary click is when a user takes further action to call or look up directions.

Real-time public data is also used to target users based on a variety of topical information, such as weather, flight delays or sporting events. The company ran a campaign for Halls cough drops. By looking at the national flu index, public data provided by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Where delivered ads for Halls cough drops wherever the flu index spiked within geo-fenced regions so that the ads were only seen by users who were close to a participating retailer. "With respect to traditional retail and online shopping, it's really leveraging the technology," says Gilmartin. "Whether it's location, whether it's local search, whatever it may be. For us it's really about relevancy, leveraging that technology to help drive that consumer to wherever that merchant is that they may be looking for."

We're all in business to sell something, and ecommerce is always a requested topic when I talk to business owners in person, on Twitter, via Facebook or by email. We heard your request and we've updated the very popular post 49 E-Commerce & Shopping Carts for Small Business.

Jump to the end of this post if you don't want some of the "how" we got here and what we've found that's new and trendy…

What you'll find in the updated post:
We looked at a few of the hottest new Facebook commerce applications or ecommerce apps that work well on Facebook. Some of the ecommerce providers already listed here are keen to showcase that they "get" Facebook. (BigCommerce notably has it right on their home page.) I asked my friend and Facebook expert Mari Smith for some Facebook suggestions and she shared ShopTab, Payvment, Ecwid, and TabJuice (links in full list post).

Whether you call it social commerce, Facebook ecommerce, social shopping or some other hip term, there is no doubt that shopping and recommendations are going to continue to be a hot area for business and consumers.

Just take a look at Zaarly, which is not technically a shopping cart, but is leveraging the power of social media and connecting you with the people near you who might want to buy or sell a product or service. The point is, shopping and commerce are changing, and some of the tools in our updated ecommerce and shopping cart application list might help you manage that change.

We also found just a handful of mobile commerce applications that looked promising. As with social, the same idea holds true – lots of ecommerce providers have a mobile solution of some sort. We found that Square (photo above), Intuit and mShopper were particularly interesting. Many banks and financial institutions are building mobile apps that can help you as both a consumer and a vendor or merchant.

Finally, while the Amazon and eBay marketplaces provide an easy way for people to get into selling, I couldn't help but be amazed at the niche marketplaces cropping up. They aren't ecommerce solutions, per se, but they did impress me. Consider them a bonus! If you are an artisan or have a unique niche, sites like Etsy, ArtFire, Supermarket and eCrater are a must visit. If you make or sell a food item, check out Foodoro or Foodzie.

Full disclosure: There are many other apps that didn't make the list because they don't make it easy on the small business owner for various reasons. They don't reveal pricing or force you to call a sales rep in order to get a basic question answered. That's unacceptable in my book, so I don't include them. You have more than enough to manage in your small, but growing business. Providers that make it easy are the ones that win our loyalty.

Hat tip and thanks to ZippyCart.com, which reviews and compares ecommerce solutions on its site. While I didn't include eBay-specific shopping carts, there were a number of them listed at the Ecommerce Guide.

BOULDER, Colo., June 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- mShopper®, a leader in mobile commerce solutions for retailers, today released a complete upgrade to its mobile commerce stores (mStores™) that includes 35 new conversion-focused features, a new customizable mobile commerce design, and a suite of marketing tools designed to drive traffic and sales. mShopper's goal, according to company officials, is to make it as painless as possible in terms of time and money for retailers to drive sales from their rapidly increasing audience of mobile phone shoppers.

Chris Herzog, VP eCommerce Development at online electronics and computer retailer Geeks.com, explained: "mShopper has been with us every step of the way to make sure we had the best mStore possible. And it was ready faster and for much less money than other m-commerce providers we considered."

"We challenge our competitors' belief that a beautiful, effective mobile shopping site requires 3-6 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars," explained mShopper's CEO, David Gould. "We've invested three years in a mobile technology that builds a customized mStore in just one day so merchants can be selling to mobile shoppers much faster."

Gould added: "Retailers benefit from mShopper's unique pricing model that charges them based on performance instead of a more expensive upfront fee."

Company officials also emphasized that mShopper's Mobile Commerce Platform (MCP) offers merchants more than just functional mobile technology. It includes built-in marketing tools to merchandise featured products and deals, promote the mStore to current and new shoppers, and send out text messages. GetFirstDibs™ is mShopper's patent-pending text-messaging platform allowing retailers to communicate to opted-in mobile subscribers and drive sales through direct response and repetitive branding.

"We needed a feature to tell mobile shoppers about our daily deals," explained David Goldfarb, President of YourBestDeals.com. "Our mStore came with a very user-friendly Daily Deal scheduler with consumer-facing countdown timers. We now have some of the finest conversion rates with mShopper's platform."

The MCP was designed to let merchants easily make changes to reflect their unique brand, product line, and marketing efforts. It lets merchants customize page layouts and themes, select checkout options (e.g., Amazon, PayPal, Google), and even determine the product details, images and reviews appearing to shoppers.

Since mShopper's solution is not an app that needs to be downloaded, any shopper with a smartphone can simply type in a retailer's current web address and automatically be redirected to their mobile optimized site.

Gould added: "If you want to pay more, wait longer, and get less, we're simply not the company for you."

Company officials have issued a challenge to retailers. Gould explained: "Send us your product data feed and we'll deliver a live mStore with 35 sales-focused features in one day...or your first 3 months are on us. Visit mShopper.com to begin."

Mobile commerce site builder mShopper has unveiled a new version of its m-commerce platform designed to help retailers achieve higher conversion rates by offering customers more information in slicker fashion.

The new home page adds a carousel of revolving products a retailer can use to spotlight special promotions or hot deals. It is among five primary objects on the home page that merchants can customize and place where they wish. A site search box appears atop the home page and every page of the site. The company says its clients' mobile business is driven by search. The site search functionality has been upgraded to enable retailers to weight product categories and other facets to deliver search results in an optimal manner.

Also on the home page are a large hero image and sections for Top Categories and Top Brands. All elements of the home page are customizable and can be placed in any order.

Product details pages have been touched up. The mShopper platform hooks up to a retailer's product data feed, which can be accessed through the mShopper platform dashboard. There retailers can integrate product name, image and description with three new tabbed sections below. The tabs can be used to display any aspect of product details a retailer chooses, such as size, color or specs.

And the vendor updated its shopping cart. It now offers integration with Amazon.com Inc.'s Checkout by Amazon, eBay Inc.'s PayPal and Google Inc.'s Google Checkout. It also has incorporated a retargeting tool designed to remind shoppers of items in a cart they abandoned. The system sends reminders via e-mail or text message.

MShopper now constructs sites using HTML5, the latest Internet programming language that many experts say is far more powerful than HTML4 and has the potential to help companies create sites that look and function more like their richer cousins, mobile apps. The language can render on any smartphone.

"We spent a lot of time on the design talking with merchants and consumers," says David Gould, founder and CEO of mShopper. "It's an entirely new design that incorporates the most important features that drive conversion. And everything is customizable on the fly."

MShopper currently has 24 clients and expects to have more than 50 by the end of June. It offers its platform in a software-as-a-service setting, and charges a monthly license fee and a small commission on every sale. The fee structure is tiered. Merchants with fewer than 100,000 unique monthly visitors pay $99 per month; 100,000 to one million, $499; and one million or more, $999. The commission is a retailer's published affiliate rate or a minimum of 5%.

Carolina Rustica is no stranger to virtual commerce. The Concord, N.C.-based retailer specializing in handcrafted iron and wood furniture went online in 2000. Between 85 percent and 90 percent of current sales originate via the web, says founder and president Richard Sexton, with the average order exceeding $1,000.

Now Carolina Rustica is moving its showroom to the smartphone -- and though dining room tables and four-poster beds may seem at odds with the digital impulse purchases typically synonymous with mobile commerce, Sexton says that keeping up with the competition makes mobile a necessary evolution.

"We're going up against the big outfits, like [home décor powerhouse] CSN Stores--they're not an 800-pound gorilla but a 2,000-pound gorilla, so it's important to keep pace with what they're doing," he says. "You can't exclude mobile commerce. People are doing everything on their smartphones, including shopping."

"It's very difficult to launch a mobile presence," says mShopper founder and CEO David Gould, citing the lack of uniform mobile web standards and the broad array of devices. "You've got to rethink your entire page layout for mobile because of the tiny screens. The context is also a challenge--you're trying to reach a user who's on the go and whose needs are different."

Carolina Rustica launched its fledgling mobile website in partnership with Boulder, Colo.-based mShopper, which in September introduced Mobile Commerce Platform. With it, merchants of all sizes can build customized smartphone storefronts, or "mStores." Included are design tools, built-in merchandising mechanisms and SEO resources, as well as an analytics dashboard to measure traffic and sales. Every order generated by a client's mStore is input directly into the retailer's existing shopping cart, ensuring that standard order and customer service processes still apply.

Retailers simply upload their product data feed and design their mStore, guided by mShopper's videos. Once it's live, merchants also can leverage mShopper's GetFirstDibs mobile marketing program, which transmits text-based discounts and promotions to customers on the retailer's mobile mailing list.

"We're here to help generate buzz and awareness and to drive traffic to your homepage," Gould says. "We only make money when merchants do."

mShopper charges retailers a monthly licensing fee ranging from $99 to $999, depending on website traffic. The firm collects a commission of at least 5 percent of the sale, or the store's published standard affiliate rates.

Along with Carolina Rustica, more than 10 other retailers signed on with mShopper during Mobile Commerce Platform's first few weeks online. And mShopper expects to have 50 to 100 paying customers by the end of the year.

"The obvious question is why you should create an mStore when customers can browse your website on a smartphone," Sexton says. "The answer is that people need to start seeing your products right away. You can't worry about download times or screen sizes. You can't keep your website like it is and hope it all resolves on a phone."

Mobile commerce continues to gain traction among consumers and merchants, but have we reached the tipping point for mobile commerce transactions where they are as acceptable as standard Internet transactions?

It seems that recently there has been a noticeable influx of success stories and developments in the mobile payments space.

Indeed, within barely a week of launching its new mobile ordering platform, Domino's Pizza generated $1 million in revenue and has been touted as a leading example for mobile commerce business strategies.

Based on recent success, the company's goal of attaining 25 percent of its digital sales from portable devices does not seem that far off.

Similarly, the 2011 holiday season proved to be one of the most successful times in mobile commerce history, showing 18.3 percent of all traffic to online retail sites and 14.4 percent of all sales coming from a mobile device on Christmas Day, up from 8.4 percent traffic and 5.3 percent sales in 2010, according to IBM.

So, does this mean that we have reached a point where mobile payments have become the preferred method for consumers, or at the very least, as standard as card transactions?

Judging by the latest industry statistics from Forrester Research that predict mobile payments will become a $31 billion industry by 2016, it would seem that we are well on the way to ecommerce transactions on a mobile device being a significant revenue channel for retailers across a variety of industries.

For mobile commerce to truly take off, however, the benefits of buying on a mobile device have to outweigh the associated challenges and risks.

Usability issues
One of the biggest barriers to more widespread mobile commerce adoption is usability.

Thirty-nine percent of smartphone shoppers are currently frustrated by the length of the process when purchasing an item via their mobile device, according to our research.

Having too many steps to get to the final payment confirmation may even deter mobile shoppers from completing the transaction.

Similarly, 38 percent were found to be irritated by the amount of information that they needed to provide when making transactions on their smartphone and were frustrated by Web sites that were not yet mobile-friendly or available in app form.

In spite of these usability challenges, however, the community of shoppers willing to embrace mobile devices instead of a desktop or laptop for their purchasing is growing.

In fact, Mobio Identity Systems recently reported that 82 percent of survey respondents see themselves making a mobile payment within the next year.

Of course, if the ease of use for mobile transactions does not improve, this number could dwindle significantly as nearly 29 percent cite speed and simplicity as the most important factor for mobile payments.

Consumer demands for seamless and simple mobile commerce purchases are high because they are already used to easy shopping experiences online.

Therefore, for mobile commerce to truly take off, merchants need to apply the lessons that they have learned in the ecommerce arena and implement them in the mobile world. If merchants can accomplish this, they will be able to more easily tap into an increasingly lucrative channel ahead of their competitors.

Security concerns
In addition to usability concerns, another key, make-it-or-break-it issue for the mobile commerce industry, and top-of-mind for consumers, is security.

In the same Mobio study, security was recently ranked as the most important factor for making a mobile purchase among 73 percent of survey respondents, although an astonishing 94 percent of North Americans said they would have no problem making a mobile payment, if they knew it was secure.

In light of these findings, merchants need to carefully consider the security of their mobile commerce solution against overall usability.

Consumers want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to payments, having a secure but simple transaction on any device. Merchants, however, are aware that different channels carry different fraud challenges.

The problem here is that traditional industry security methods, including the authentication tools VerifiedByVisa and MasterCard SecureCode, are very difficult to render on most mobile devices.

But, with all of the forecasted growth in the mobile commerce industry, merchants are understandably eager to provide consumers with a seamless transaction.

This catch-22 requires mobile commerce merchants to give more careful consideration to their fraud and security strategies.

Risk-screening tools can help alleviate such concerns by using environmental factors to screen transactions, including elements such as card issuing country, shopper IP address and device ID.

Additionally, companies such as CellPoint and Mobank offer solutions that enable authentication tools for mobile commerce, thereby providing a more secure transaction process on any smartphone and tablet device.

Convenience matters
For consumers, mobile commerce is all about convenience.

Rather than browsing product purchases in the evenings and on weekends, consumers are making buying decisions on the go.

And with the amount of time people spend on the go these days, whether going to and from work or riding public transportation around busy cities, this is a major area for growth.

However, if security concerns remain an issue, mobile commerce industry growth trajectories may be stalled.

As with any retail strategy, consumers lie at the heart of its success.

By combining the latest security strategies with mobile commerce platforms, merchants will have a solution that not only meets consumer desire for a simple process from purchase decision to completed transaction, but

one that will also address security concerns head on.

Designing such solutions from a consumer perspective will generate new, innovative and highly attractive solutions that will result in an increase in both mobile shopping and revenue for merchants across a wide variety of industries.

Gabriel Hopkins is head of ecommerce products at WorldPay, London. Reach him at gabriel.hopkins@worldpay.com.

New York--More than 12 percent of website traffic came from mobile devices in Q4 2011, a year-over-year increase of 102 percent, according to marketing and public relations firm Walker Sands Communications.

The percentage of website traffic coming from mobile devices in 2011 rose as the year went on, starting at 6 percent in Q1 and ending at 13 percent in Q4.

"When we began this study in Q3 2010, traffic originating from mobile devices accounted for a relatively modest portion--four percent--of total Web traffic," John Fairley, director of digital services at Walker Sands, told Internet Retailer. "More than a year later, we have seen a significant uptick in mobile browsing … We can only expect this trend to continue as more consumers become smartphone users who browse on the go."

Companies that have an online presence but haven't developed a solid mobile strategy yet need to start taking the mobile platform seriously, Fairley added.

Most mobile traffic in Q4 2011 came from Android devices (46 percent), followed by iPhones (31 percent). iPads accounted for 16 percent of traffic, and Blackberry accounted for 4 percent.

Walker Sands notes that Android has overcome Apple in the top spot for mobile traffic and is continuing to grow.

"Android's expansive portfolio of mobile products makes it more accessible to a broad base of consumers than Apple's iPhone, which is why we see tremendous growth in the Android market share," Daniel Laloggia, digital marketing manager at Walker Sands, told Internet Retailer.

Still, studies have shown that iPhone and iPad users convert and spend more via mobile commerce. For example, Walker Sands said, IBM Coremetrics shows that shoppers using an iPad lead to more purchases than shoppers on other mobile devices, and the conversion rate for consumers using iPads in October 2011 was 7 percent, compared to 4 percent for overall mobile devices.

Despite this, Walker Sands reports that Android is expected to capture more of the global smartphone market in 2012, and Laloggia predicts that mobile traffic from Android devices will also increase.

Walker Sands sampled 12 clients for this report. All client websites were U.S.-based companies, and all traffic data was collected by Google Analytics.

First, the good news: If you have a website, then you have a site that can be accessed by any mobile device with a browser. Now, the bad: Chances are, that site looks pretty crappy on said mobile device.

If you're worried about this, you're not alone. Just as companies realized, circa 1996, that they needed to create a website to remain relevant to consumers, history is repeating itself in mobile. By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online, according to Gartner. In mid-2011, we also reached the point at which consumers were spending more time on their mobile devices than on their PCs.

In such an environment, a site designed to be viewed on a desktop PC comes across as woefully lacking. Say you're accessing such a site from the Safari browser on your iPhone. The first thing you're likely to notice is that it takes a relatively long time to load. The second thing is that the type on the page is pretty small. It might take a lot of zooming and pinching to navigate the site as well. If you have Flash on your site, it's not going to come across at all on an iPhone.

At that point, your potential customer may start looking around. According to a recent survey from Compuware, 40% of users have turned to a competitor's site after a bad mobile experience.

Yet currently, most businesses haven't optimized their sites for mobile. Jesse Haines, group marketing manager for Google Mobile Ads, says the company canvassed its large advertisers early in 2011 and found only 21% have launched a mobile site.

If you're among the other 79% or so, take heart. Optimizing your site for mobile or creating a mobile site from scratch isn't a big deal.

In part, that's because Google has stepped in. The company is eager to expand its online advertising empire further into mobile. With an eye towards "growing the mobile ecosystem" as Haines puts it, Google last month launched GoMo, an initiative that aims to help businesses go mobile.

Google's howtogomo.com is a clearinghouse of information on the topic and even includes a feature that lets you see how your site looks on a mobile device.

For those looking for a quick fix, Google provides a list of companies that will build your mobile site for you, and you can specify what you want to spend. Haines says that you can get up and running for as little as $100 a year.

Dennis Mink, VP of marketing at DudaMobile, one of the vendors Google lists on GoMo, says he thinks the average price for a decent mobile site is more like $200 to $500. If you're comfortable with website design, though, DudaMobile offers DIY tools as well, which are just $9 a month. While the company's web-based software is free, the fee goes toward hosting and site analytics. (Yes, if you're running a mobile site, you have to pay two hosting fees — one for your traditional website and one for mobile.)

One recent DudaMobile customer is TriStar Automotive, a Santa Rosa, Calif., repair shop. Jim Dadaos, the owner of the shop, says his web developer told him a few months back that he needed to get a mobile site "because that's where everything is going." Dadaos's developer contacted DudaMobile, which created the site "within a very short time" and it's been up and running for six months. During that time Dadaos says he's seen a 20% spike in business. "During these times, the auto repair business is sucking, so that's significant," he says.

Mink and Haines offer a few tips for building a good mobile website. One thing to consider is whether your site is what Haines calls "thumb-friendly." What that means in practice is lots of big, fat buttons. Another thing to keep in mind is font size and navigation. The first should be fairly large, and the second should be fairly intuitive.

Haines says one site that renders especially well on mobile is 1-800 Flowers, which, as you see below, is both thumb-friendly and intuitive.

Another site Haines singles out is from PacSun, the teen-focused clothing brand:

Incidentally, if you're considering a mobile app rather than a mobile website, Haines says to go for the website. "It really depends on the brand," she says. "We think a mobile website is a must-have." Haines says that for some brands, like news sites for instance, a mobile app makes sense, but otherwise, most users are going to look for you via their browser.

Mink agrees: "If you're going to search for any type of business, you're going to search the mobile web, not an app store," he says. "People don't look for apps that will give them information."

Google is giving mobile advertisers yet another nudge as it attempts to make them more mobile-friendly.

As of Wednesday, mobile optimization will now be included in Google's "ads quality" ranking, which (along with pricing) determines what ads get served when. So—all other things being equal—an ad that links to a mobile-friendly website will get served alongside Google's mobile search results before an ad that doesn't.

"We cannot expect that every site will dramatically or magically become mobile optimized," says Surojit Chatterjee, who leads Google's mobile search ads team. However, Google can give advertisers a little more incentive, because the ones with mobile-friendly sites will now be able to "drive more traffic at a slightly lower cost."

Google has already taken steps in this direction. Chatterjee says that last year the company started limiting mobile ads that link to pages dominated by Flash-format content, which famously doesn't work on iPhones. In June, it announced a new feature in Google Sites to help advertisers build mobile-optimized landing pages. Still, a survey in February found that 79 percent of Google's largest advertisers don't have mobile-friendly websites (the number has probably decreased at least slightly since then), so this should give them another push.

Why does Google care? Chatterjee says that without a mobile-optimized site, the effectiveness of an ad is limited. He points to a recent survey where 61 percent of respondents said they would be unlikely to return to a website if it doesn't perform well on their mobile phone.

Having a strong mobile presence will be particularly important in the coming months, Chatterjee says, because Google expects heavy mobile search traffic during the holiday shopping season. In fact, the company is projecting that 15 percent of all Black Friday searches will be mobile.

Chatterjee's arguments seem to apply to Google's normal, unpaid search results as well—if people don't want to click on ads linking to websites that don't work on their phones, they probably don't want to click on search results with the same problem. But when asked if the company includes mobile optimization in its organic search rankings, Chatterjee declined to comment, saying a different team is responsible. (Adweek followed up on that question with a Google spokesman, who also declined to comment.)