Now in order to enhance customer transactions, and keep up with rapid market trends, businesses should seriously consider developing for the mobile platform. Especially if they wish to remain relevant in today’s e-commerce immersed society. In fact, most consumers now have high expectations for e-commerce in general, with many people seeing very little difference between the experiences they receive on different devices.

So what platform do you go for? Well it depends entirely on who your target audience are, and whilst it’s true that the iPhone dominates in terms of time spent browsingonline, it’s important to remember that there are other smart phones out there (Blackberry, Android etc..) and by developing solely for a single system, you risk limiting yourself and alienating potential consumers.

However, deciding that you’re going to develop for mobile is the easy part. It’s the implementation that’s tricky, with many companies spending vast sums of money and still getting it wrong. Especially when the basic principles of developing a good mobile app/site are quite simple: all you need to do is make sure that you’re mobile app/site is…

1. Simple to use
2. Reliable
3. Fast and efficient

Getting these elements right is crucial, as 83% of consumers experience problems when trying to complete a purchase online, and end up abandoning their transaction. Despite the fact that many of them said, a mobile transaction should be a better shopping experience than making the same purchase in store (51%) or at a computer (52%).

You may also be wondering what do you go for? A mobile application or a mobile optimised site?  Well a mobile application is a native application written for that specific device. This means that it’s tailored to that devices features (screen size, key controls etc.) A mobile optimised site is quicker to market, supported across most devices and cheaper, but it lacks any real customisation However what you chose to develop for depends entirely on what your requirements are. Because an app may sound fun, but unless the customer already has your app on their phone, then they may not have easy access to your services… Whereas a mobile optimised site will provide them with easier access but may not be as quick to load as an app.

So is it really worth developing for mobile? At five one two we think the answer is pretty simple – yes.  However we do specialise in developing innovative mobile solutions, coupled with scalable enterprise grade sales order processing and e-commerce systems. So we’ve helped lots of our clients (in various different industries) enhance their services by implementing mobile solutions. Finally, another example of mobile development done right is ASOS. Their mobile site design is sleek, simple to use, and since launch mobile sales have increased by a staggering 800% in 12 months. Plus Argos (who don’t sell online) does have a mobile “Check and reserve” app which is responsible for bringing in £2.6 million per week. Now ask yourself, is this a market that you can afford to ignore..? We don’t think so either.

For further information about how we can help you, please call Cat Goulbourne on 02380 987 512 or email info@fiveonetwo.com.

Statistics source: Econsultancy

So although the product itself should be praised for its design innovation, so should the brand’s official website, which is responsible for establishing and maintaining Verenti’s online presence. As well as providing customers with somewhere to research the products and brand outside of the Wiggle retail site.

This is why Wiggle asked us to develop and design a professional, informative, yet stylish website for their premium Verenti bikes back in 2010. The brief was to establish an online presence for the new Verenti brand that reflected the premium nature of the product, as well as provided customers with concise and detailed information. The site also needed to provide an outlet for communicating sportive events and the latest developments in products and accessories.

To achieve this we utilised AJAX and DHTML for the product pages, to provide an immersive and interactive experience with the high quality imagery. Also in order to push the existing product brand further to work online; we worked with the key stakeholders, as well as the product design team on a series of iterative concepts. As for the community aspect of the site, we incorporated a blog and events calendar as well as links through to retailers and purchase.

In the end the online presence combined with sponsoring some of the key national sportive events has led to a very rapid development of a previously un-established brand. Product sales and interest have risen significantly and the cycling press have provided high praise. A year later, who would have guessed that Verenti would beat global retail giants to win an innovation award? Just goes to show you what a strong product and an equally strong internet presence can achieve.

So you’re probably thinking –“what exactly *is* the cloud?” Well cloud computing is a buzzword that means different things to different people (as with Web 2.0). For some, it’s just another way of describing IT outsourcing. However many others use it to mean a computer service provided over the Internet, others argue that anything that sits outside your firewall is part of the cloud. Confused? Don’t be: like I was saying earlier the cloud isn’t a new concept. Chances are, you probably use cloud computing every day and don’t even realise it.

The problem is many companies who have heard about the cloud, now think they need it. They don’t know why, or indeed exactly what they want from it, but they’ve been told it’s the next best thing and that it’ll be cheaper for them as there’s no wastage: the costing model always sounds cheaper and you only pay for what you use – what’s not to like? Well when it comes to hosting, the problem is you need to factor in compute cycles, of which there is no standard measurement or unit so you can’t factor these in with any real confidence.

In reality, we’ve been delivering cloud based solutions to clients for years. All of our high availability infrastructures exist as private clouds. Our web based approach to software is the same benefit as the cloud is being sold on, namely that you can access the software anytime, anywhere and don’t need to maintain/manage your own infrastructure. It’s just software as a service (SaaS) or an application service provider (ASP) which are nothing new – it’s just re-branded.

For example in 2006 because Amazon was only using a fraction of its massive, global, computing power, it started renting out its spare capacity over the net through a new entity called Amazon Web Services; which works exactly like a private cloud but you access your resources through a secure network connection, like an Intranet. Since then Google and many other companies have followed suit, and although these are great products (however they are not a solution for everything) they are inherently shared solutions. The question is – would you consider hosting your business critical application on a shared virtual server? Some would say yes, but for many the security risks would be too high. Having said that though, there are composite methods that can be implemented, for instance we’ve just utilised cloud storage for the backup process for one of our clients.

In the end I guess there’s no harm in re-labelling the internet, we did it with Web2.0, we’re doing it with the cloud and we’ll invariably be doing it again when HTML 5 matures. It’s just the noise, confusion and hype that get’s to me. I just wish there was some sort of public service announcement to explain there’s nothing new here, nothing to see, move along, it’s just a new name for what you’ve already been doing.

Cat Goulbourne

Hence on May 25th 2010, eFlorist was bought by Euroflorist. The Swedish company are Europe’s largest florist member relay network and were the first company in Europe to sell flowers over the internet. This merger was partially thanks to the new sales order processing system that we developed for eFlorist, which continues to perform seamlessly and increase customer and member loyalty.

So where does this lead us? Well currently we are deploying the system to fourteen different European countries; which sounds a lot easier than it actually is: each country has its own specific business logic around transactions and functionality. Plus some countries don’t have post codes or equivalent data (such as Ireland), our solution is to build on top of the existing scalable platform developing modular components for ‘internationalisation’. This will allow translated versions of the system to run in specific territories and to deal with the time zone differences for that region. Currently the eFlorist.net system supports over 1800 member florist organisations, transacting and routing sales orders in real-time; with this in mind we designed the eFlorist platform with scalability and resilience in mind. So the increased load of extra users from additional countries won’t be so much of a challenge. Plus we also monitor the ‘private cloud’ of servers that host and manage eFlorist on a 24×7 basis, and are able to optimise, tune and deploy new server hardware to cope with additional processing requirements, pro actively.

As techies who deliver real business solutions; we’ve been really impressed with the resilience, and availability of this business critical system.  We believe that the management at eFlorist have invested wisely at the beginning of the project; to provide for a development budget, ensuring maximum uptime and availability of the system. Whilst we had a few niggles upon going live, (lasting less than 2 weeks but hairy all the same!) the system hasn’t missed a beat since.

Unfortunately eFlorist is a closed system, so unless you’re a member florist you won’t get to use it – however if you’d like more information, you can read the case study in our portfolio. Or if you’d just like to order some flowers then you can buy online from eFlorist or Euroflorist directly.

Cat Goulbourne