An often overlooked sales avenue is mobile phone users and I admit it wasn’t until last year I began to take it more seriously.  I have been testing various ways of promoting the fact my sites  work on mobile phones like the iPhone and I’ve made quite an (obvious) discovery which has resulted in a big increase in overall sales…

Mobile phone sales accounted for 0.5% of sales on my online store but I couldn’t help thinking of all the people like me who are sat on trains surfing the net.  I was convinced I could be doing better.  I spoke to a number of users and the thing that came up the most was they are used to stores not working and because they are working on a tiny screen they didn’t want to go through the process of ordering when they weren’t certain it would work. This makes perfect sense.

So I set up about trialling different ways of letting them know my site would work. I first added text but I only saw a marginal increase in mobile sales.  I then thought about adding a CSS class targeting small resolutions but there are so many it wasn’t really an option.  I finally opted for an image and I created a dozen different images and placed them in different locations and set about doing some usability testing with a handful of avid mobile phone users to see which one was the winner.

The clear winner was an image of an iphone leaning against a shopping cart placed in the top left hand side of the page with the message “Buy on your iPhone”… BINGO! An instant increase in overall sales and now iPhone, iPods, and Blackberrys are all in the top 10 list of operating systems buying from the site.  The spin off is other non-mobile related tools like the Playstation 3 have also seen an increase.

I now have  more sales coming in from just a simple little graphic on the homepage. Who says usability testing isn’t fun

The message is clear;  there is a huge untapped market for mobile phone sales but you need to get your site working on them and then promote the fact it does. Don’t just rely on a .mobi domain – promote it to the full by utilising a little bit of space on the main domain.

See the site: http://www.devonlocks.com

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