Econsultancy recently reported ‘Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in the way that customers browse and research purchases, with a third of smartphone users browsing retail sites on their phones.’ and also suggested that this might well be ‘The Year of Mobile‘. For most digital marketers mobile is either on the horizon or firmly parked on the doorstep.

Magento’s new Magento Mobile platform allows you to create mobile apps using the catalog, content, and business rules already set up in your Magento store, making it very easy for Magento merchants to create apps for their stores. For an overview of the Magento solution, take a look at this webinar – Magento Mobile Quick Start.

I recently blogged about 7 reasons why Magento could be the next ecommerce solution for you and this has quickly become reason number 8 for me! The ease of integration with your existing store and the nicely designed user interface makes it a no-brainer for anyone currently running Magento.

Designing your first Magento Mobile App

The user interface for the e-commerce application can be customised in a number of ways. In the webinar above they give a nice overview of the customisation and whilst it’s certainly not a blank canvas to work from it gives a brand enough control to make the App look and feel like their own.

In the screen shot above you can see some examples of the customisation – your logo and the ability to theme with colours of the various UI elements are two basic elements that you can control.

I’ve just started working on the visual design of my first Magento Mobile App and thought other designers might find the Fireworks PNG useful to download to help create concept designs. The PNG includes two ‘pages’ , the first is the Home screen when the App launches and the second is for the Product Index.

Download the Magento Mobile App Fireworks PNG (Hosted on Box.net)

This is only version 1 and I’ll aim to include more elements as I work on this project. Updated versions of the file will be made available as part of this blog post.

Updated: My First App Design – Great-save.com

Having created the template above it was time to get designing and the first project I’ve decided to get my teeth into is the Great Save App, an app for a goalkeeping specialist store that I am a director of here in the UK. The first designs we’re heavily influenced by the example North Face designs that Magento demoed in their recent webinar.

App Home – First concept

Product Index – First concept

So here are my 7 great reasons why you should seriously consider Magento as your next ecommerce platform:

1. Multiple stores - Whether you want one single ecommerce shop or to migrate a handful of shops to Magento, the platform has the capability to meet your needs. The creation of new stores is made extremely easy and can all be carried out in the back-end of Magento. A single Magento installation can happily have multiple stores using different domain names, different IP’s and different security certificates. Find out more in the Knowledge base article How Multiple Websites & Stores Work

2. A/B testing – Magento’s integration with Google Website Optimizer gives you a powerful, easy-to-use tool for driving sales online. Google’s Website Optimizer is a popular free tool that helps website owners dramatically improve conversion rates by conducting A/B testing and multivariate testing of their website content and layout. Net Sales Trainer (Membership required) have a great How To video for setting this up.

3. Guest Checkout – The word Registration can send fear into even the most experienced online shopper. Magento avoids this issue by offering the shopper the option of making a purchase as a Guest. By obtaining the essential customer, payment and delivery information it makes for a quick and easy checkout experience. This Magento screencast walks you through the Guest Checkout.

4. Expandable – Magento Connect is to Magento what the iTunes App Store is to the iPhone. The variety and quality of extensions is excellent and following a recent revamp it’s now even easier to find the right extension for your needs. Pricing for extensions does vary, but the detailed information, customer reviews and support forums give you all the information you should need on whether your buying the correct add-on to your ecommerce store.

5. Numbers – Built into the back end are a really useful set of Reports, from Best Sellers to Search Terms it gives you a lot of the answers to common ecommerce reporting requirements. The other great ‘numbers’ related feature is the built-in support for Google Analytics. This is more than just your basic statistical reporting, it offers full ecommerce tracking for products and conversions as well.

6. Themes – Magento Themes are certainly not for the light-hearted, but once you have an understanding it does offer some amazing visual design and customisation options. To see some brilliant examples of what is possible with Magento take a look at the Magento Spotting section of their blog.

7. Online Support – Magento has become one of THE most talked about ecommerce solutions by creating and supporting their online community. This community has grown into a comprehensive support network through great forums, groups, IRC chat and even broadcasting a problem on twitter can usually get a prompt response.

Hopefully the 7 points above and links included within them will leave you more informed about Magento, but if you have any other questions or queries please do post a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

• Apple continue to grab media attention with the announcement of iPhone OS 3.0
• Internet Explorer 8 was released on Thursday for general consumption, if you haven’t already it’s time to download and test those websites!
• E-commerce new comer and pace-setter Magento receives some SEO tweaks in this blog post from Yoast.
• Just before the IE8 release, Google snuck out v2.0 of Google Chrome in beta format.
• Adobe Fireworks is my chosen image editing application, it’s the image app that I grew up with really. I spotted this nice post that covers 40 Adobe Fireworks tutorials, well worth a look.

I’m on the look out for an individual or company that’s experienced with the relatively new e-commerce platform Magento. Our current e-commerce solution has done extremely well, but it’s time to move to a more substantial e-commerce solution. If you can help, email me – info [@] simonlilly.co.uk