The Basket Lady went live with a mobile site in March.
For specialty basket retailer BasketLady.com, creating a mobile presence wasn’t exactly a top priority. The Basket Lady’s customers, mainly non-tech savvy females between 30 and 50 years old, weren’t asking for a mobile-optimized site, says Kelli Katch, vice president of business development.
However, when Katch’s e-commerce platform provider, CoreCommerce, part of Sum Effect Software Inc., offered to help her create an m-commerce site for free and with little to no work on her end, she figured, why not?
The Basket Lady went live with a mobile site in March. To date, mobile sales at the retailer, which carries about 300 SKUs, are minimal—around $3,000. But that’s $3,000 Katch gladly welcomes.
The Basket Lady is a prime example of a new trend in m-commerce. As the channel grows, mobile commerce is gradually trickling down to even the smallest of e-retailers. First to mobile were the big guns such as Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc., each of which today are doing more than $1 billion annually in mobile sales and boast dedicated mobile executives. Next came an onslaught of mid-sized retailers that believed mobile was worth an investment and sought out mobile vendors such as Digby or Usablenet Inc. to build a mobile presence for them. Now, retailers like The Basket Lady, which launched in the early 1990's selling at country markets, are creating a mobile presence because their e-commerce platform providers are making it easy to do.
"It was offered as part of their package, and so I said, ‘OK, make my site mobile compatible’,” Katch says.
CoreCommerce unveiled its mobile offering in March as part of CoreCommerce 7.7, an updated version of its e-commerce platform. The CoreCommerce software automatically detects if a mobile device is accessing a retailer’s online store and then adjusts and optimizes the display for the smaller screens of the mobile devices. Merchants can continue to use their existing payment processors for the mobile-optimized site.
CoreCommerce is one of several e-commerce platform providers catering to smaller retailers that now offer mobile. Others include BigCommerce, Shopatron and Yahoo Stores, which partners with m-commerce technology provider Unbound Commerce to offer mobile.
In the future, Katch says she’d like to optimize mobile navigation and finesse the look and feel of the site. For now, however, she’s content with a few extra grand in her company’s back pocket.
Comments | 2 Responses
Another very good article Bill! Seamus
Thank you very much, Seamus. Stay tuned for a big mobile development at Peapod. And catch m-commerce coverage as it happens on Twitter at @IRmcommerce.
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