Mobile Checkout and Bandwidth
Take steps to make your mobile checkout experience a good one. Because mobile Web transactions are often done in public, people feel even less secure about entering credit card and other personal information. Integrating a professional checkout service that stores this data online can make a big difference. Be mindful of your customers' bandwidth usage by minimizing animation and video streaming.
Take advantage of mobile Web by linking to other mobile resources. If you want to give directions to your physical store, you might link to the mobile version of a mapping service like Google Maps or MapQuest. You can also take advantage of location-based social networking sites like Foursquare. When people check in to your store, Telling their friends where they are... you can reward them with discounts and specials.
Those are some good starting guidelines, but before we finish, let's talk about a couple of exceptions to these rules. The first has to do with the inherent limitations of a mobile site, which might, for example, feature fewer items than your regular website. So it's a good idea to give mobile customers an easy way to access your regular home page, even though the design is not optimal for a small screen.
The other exception is the iPad. Apple's new tablet PC is in a class by itself with the iPhone's gesture-recognition user interface, and, of course, is much larger than a smartphone, but smaller than a laptop. Even so, the iPad's 9.7-inch screen is razor sharp, large enough that most e-commerce websites will work just fine.
With so much to do preparing for the holiday season, all these pointers might seem like an impossibly tall order. So at the very least, do this: Grab your favorite smartphone and do some "window shopping" on your favorite e-commerce sites. That will tell you something about the state of the art for mobile shopping. Then visit your own site. The comparison will give you a good sense of the mobile road ahead.