OK Skate: Mobile-Commerce App for the iPhone
Magento Mobile allowed us to roll out an iPhone commerce app in just a few days at a low cost, and even completed the approval process for us, saving valuable time and resources. Customer feedback has been great so far, as the app makes it simple for mobile users to search, order and pay for goods through our site.
Rick Schwartz, president of OK Skate
Magento Mobile allowed us to roll out an iPhone commerce app in just a few days at a low cost, and even completed the approval process for us, saving valuable time and resources. Customer feedback has been great so far, as the app makes it simple for mobile users to search, order and pay for goods through our site.
Rick Schwartz, president of OK Skate
Last week, we announced the official launch of Magento Mobile, and today we’d like to introduce you to the first of many native applications to launch through our new mobile-commerce platform.
OK Skate, a Southern-California based company, describes themselves as a “community of people who love fashion, music, art, sports and, of course, skating.” With over 14,000 facebook fans, and hundreds of products, OK Skate needed a solution to give their community instant access to new products, styles, and sales at any moment during the day. To make this happen, OK Skate turned to Magento Mobile, which allows their customers to browse their product catalog in real time, purchase products on the go, and even access their existing account and purchase history through the default, integrated account-management feature.
OK Skate’s decision to roll out their iPhone app during the month of September is a great decision as we move closer to the holiday season, because they’ll have more users to communicate with as Magento rolls out more personalized features in Q4. For merchants considering whether to deploy their own, branded mobile application through Magento Mobile, now is the time to purchase your activation key and get started.
Here is a quick tour of the some of the features in the new OK Skate app. You can see more by downloading their app here, or via the link in the featured-apps tab of the Magento Mobile product page.
Home Tab
The Magento Mobile Admin allows merchants to have full control over the branding of their iPhone app, even after the app has been submitted to iTunes and downloaded by users. On the home-tab specifically, this includes the image at the top of the page, as well as the colors of buttons, backgrounds, etc.
Browse Top-Level Categories
After downloading Magento Mobile, a new field for “product category thumbnail” is added to the category manager within the Magento Admin. Store owners have the option to add an 80x80 image for each of their top-level categories.
Browse Sub-Categories
Sub-categories are displayed as a list. The background image for both the category and sub-category pages are managed from the ‘Design’ tab of the Magento-Mobile admin.
Product List
Store admins can associate Magento Mobile with an existing store view, or even create new store views exclusively for their mobile channel. After doing so, the product catalog and all the associated data (images, prices, discounts, inventory, etc.) is dynamically populated into the app in real time. Of course, the Magento-Mobile iPhone app will handle caching to improve the user experience.
Product List (with filters)
User can apply filters to the product list to refine their search. When they return to the list, they can see their filters (and even remove them) by clicking the bar near the top of the screen.
Product List (swiped row)
Additional options are exposed when a user ‘swipes’ the product listing in the row. This is a great effect that also uncovers navigation tools that save customers time while shopping for the right product.
Product-Detail Page
The branding and meta data for products is dynamically populated based on the store-owner’s settings. Magento Mobile supports configurable, simple, and bundled product types.
Add Product to Cart
After adding an item to their car, users have the option to continue shopping or proceed to checkout. Magento Mobile supports the existing standard checkout process, as well as select in-line payment options. PayPal’s new “Mobile Embedded “Payments (MEP)” product is also supported. Store owners also have the option to add a new store view for mobile and associate different payment methods to mobile vs. their existing web stores.
