Wine merchant Geerlings & Wade launched a mobile commerce site on May 19. The site, which had a soft launch last week, is designed to bring a simpler home page to users accessing the site from a mobile device, says Chris Edwards, general manager of Geerlings & Wade and the Winetasting Network.
Users who access the Geerlings & Wade site from an iPhone or Android are automatically redirected to the mobile site. Those using a Blackberry and other smart phones need to type mobile.geerwade.com into the navigation bar for access.
Edwards says Geerlings & Wade saw evidence in its analytics that indicated users were accessing its site via mobile browsers. So it asked customers in an e-mail poll and called 50 of its top 100 customers for their opinion.
“We polled our audience and they were overwhelmingly in favor of using a mobile device to access our site,” Edwards says, adding that customers have already made purchases off the mobile site.
Edwards says he looked at the mobile road map built by parent company 1-800-Flowers.com – which acquired Geerlings & Wade in March 2009.
Edwards describes the Geerlings & Wade mobile site as “basic,” but added that the development team is already to add more interactivity and content about wine to it in further months.
For now, the front page of the mobile site is condensed to include the marketer’s top sellers and its monthly featured items. The mobile site also includes two “call us” buttons to enable the user to contact a customer service rep without closing the browser window.
While Edwards says his audience appears to be tech-savvy and follows the merchant via social media like Facebook and Twitter, many customers are still feeling its way around new technology. For instance, the community doesn’t seem quite ready for tweet-ups.
“We asked our customers if they would be interested in Tweet-ups, but they didn’t seem to know what they were,” Edwards says about the possibility of live meetings of Geerlings & Wade’s Twitter followers.