Smart Phone Compatibility

I recently read that, within the next few years, the vast majority of internet purchases are going to be made through mobile phones, rather than desktop and laptop computers.

Whilst most Opencart websites can be viewed on these devices, it concerns me that, as far as I am aware, there are no templates available that are designed specifically for mobile phones and can be run so that a website can, at the same time, also be viewed on a desktop in the 'traditional' format.

Am I missing something? If so, I’d be grateful for a point in the right direction. If not, do others share my concerns and is anything being done to ensure that this Opencart does not fall behind on this front?

Many thanks,

I really feel that this is very important, and wonder if anyone knows anything more about mobile compatibility?

It's early days yet, but there are a few thoughts on this thread
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=38657

..plus one or two others - a search on 'mobile' will dig them out for you

This was a promising looking interface:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=21552

but looks like the link is throwing an error now

Qphoria wrote:This was a promising looking interface:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=21552

but looks like the link is throwing an error now

aww shame...from the comments, it was a good one

...slightly off topic: but Magento's offering is an app, for which they want $799 per platform to set up, and then $699 per platform per year

http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/mobile
>>(...Bet that hangs on checkout too )

To come back to the topic: I guess we are looking for someone to create a mobile template, with a reliable way of detecting and serving it to users if they're on a mobile....just as uksitebuilder & Chones describe on the other thread. Mobile subdomains won't really work unless people want to fork out for a wildcard SSL, and apps surely aren't a runner for average everyday stores...?

And I'm still not sure of conversion rates for smartphone shopping, excluding apps and downloads. Still, it's got to be considered .

Out of a sample of 130'ish sales, 2 were on an iPhone and 1 was on an ipad.

This brings me on to the next point which is that I'm not so sure that a mobile template is as necessary as it once was and I think that it is only going to get less necessary.

With the iPhone and the large screen HTC's it is easy enough to browse the standard site as the resolution on those phones is 960 x something or other which is wide enough to use the site.

If I was using one of these higher resolution large screen devices then I wouldn't actually want to use a mobile site, I'd rather browse the normal site.

At present there are plenty of phones out there that would benefit by having a mobile version (me included) but I'm not so sure that people really use them that much for web browsing. Most phones seem to be making the web easier and easier to access with large high res screens and these will over time replace the older phones that need the mobile templates. The only fly in the ointment at the moment is the Blackberry and others shaped like that.

Mobile visitors to my main website/shop total about 3.5% of which android takes up 1.6% with the iPhone at 0.4% and the blackberry way down at 0.1%

Update:
I was curious so just checked another 100 odd sales and there were 2 iphones (one from the UK and one from Germany) and 1 IE6!!

lol, my statistics are similar - IE6 and mobile browsers neck and neck..!

This is a very interesting point:

grgr wrote:... I'm not so sure that a mobile template is as necessary as it once was and I think that it is only going to get less necessary.

With the iPhone and the large screen HTC's it is easy enough to browse the standard site as the resolution on those phones is 960 x something or other which is wide enough to use the site.
...

So perhaps there's a case for "sit tight and wait for the hardware to catch up'' then..?

It's a bit like the early days of the mainstream web.... IIRC, W3C tried hard to push XML/XHTML, partly on the basis of bandwidth being at a premium. WML was then the markup language du jour for creating mobile content. But hardware advances made some of that redundant -or at least, much less critical than we were led to believe. Sometimes it does pay to look at where the hardware is going.

To come back to the topic: I guess we are looking for someone to create a mobile template, with a reliable way of detecting and serving it to users if they're on a mobile....just as uksitebuilder & Chones describe on the other thread.

Yes, I think that this is exactly it. But you do raise some interesting points re hardware... I wonder if there are any stats available on what / if any difference having a specific mobile interface makes? - It would be interesting to see.

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... order=DESC
This one worked, but when I migrated to 1.5.X, it was totally screwed. It ruined my site.

Also, http://www.algozone.com/opencart-mobile-templates.php has some but the prices are way over the top, and not 1.5.x.