Back in 2008, mobile commerce was a mere $400 million annually according to Mobile Commerce Daily.  In 2009 it quadrupled to $1.2 Billion, then doubled in 2010 to $3.4 Billion, and 2011 is looking even better.

So how’s your store looking?

I’ve found that a lot of webmasters have never even tested their site to see if it works in a mobile browser, much less tried to optimize for one.  And who could fault them, in years past it wasn’t really worth the effort.  But things are different now, and more powerful smart-phones have paved the way for more functional mobile browsers – a stunning 33% of online shoppers report they’ve used a mobile phone to check out a retailer’s website or do a price comparison while standing in a retail store.

Add this to the list of reasons why I recommend hosted shopping carts vs. owning the code, as most of the hosted ecommerce storefronts have already thought about this and made their checkout processes mobile-friendly.  I know in our office, we test every site we develop and all of the Cartooga templates against Blackberry 5 and 6, Android tablets, Android phones, iPhone, and iPad to make sure everything works like its supposed to and I speculate that the development teams of most of the other hosted carts are doing the same thing.  But if you run a shopping cart script on your own servers, you might have a lot of work ahead of you to get mobile-ready… maybe it’s time to switch.

When you’re ready to test your site, don’t just load up the home page in a mobile browser and call it a day – go through the entire checkout process, enter a credit card, and complete an order.  You never know when a customer will be standing in a store, price-shop a product, and your site comes up in the search results.  You do want that sale, right?