|
Yesterday, a plane burst two tires when it landed in London. We sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes, waiting for clearance. As I was sitting there, daydreaming, something dawned on me. It was my friend's birthday and I'd forgotten to send a card and gift. The ultimate answer to tarmac downtime sprang into mind: my Blackberry!
A quick Google search for a U.K. flower delivery company and problem solved, or so I thought. Sure enough, within seconds I was searching on Google. My list of results came up and....
Click after click, I discovered none of the e-commerce sites at the top of the pile were properly optimized for mobile search. My poor Blackberry strained to download huge graphics and navigation menus that went on forever. It became a tedious, frustrating task to click promising links, only to be thwarted by badly designed sites or technology mismatches.
A while back, I'd quickly checked the major search engines and learned they're all mobile-friendly. This is great news for me, over 6 million other Blackberry users, and who knows how many Treo and cell phone users. The dissonance comes when you get to a merchant site and actually try to do something.
I'm involved in the SEM (define) industry, so I know there are WAP (define) portals and speciality mobile sites. The average user in my situation may not know that. He just wants to go to a major search engine, search, and order some stuff.
Opportunities are being missed.
How many people are sitting on the tarmac trying to order a bunch of flowers right now? I have no idea. But six or seven e-tailors missed a sale yesterday because I couldn't do business with them. Not only that, the top results from some Google searches I did were sponsored listings. They still weren't ready for someone trying to make that impulse purchase. Sorry for clicking through and wasting your marketing bucks, guys.
Early industry research suggests the mobil
| 
