Website

Project Overview

Mobile Commerce in a Box is a turnkey solution to convert open source desktop websites into mobile fiendly websites.
Merchants simply enter their website URL and some basic details into a purpose built website to convert it to an optimised for mobile version. When customers now visit that website on a mobile phone they get a mobile friendly site: better navigation, bigger images, improved shopping cart and purchasing experience. This leads to drastically reduced bounce rates and 'shopping cart abandonment' and ultimately increased sales thru mobile.

Organisation

Paypal

Team

Paypal Australia
Ontechnology

Project Brief

By 2015, mobile will be the principle means of searching the internet. But many retailer's websites are not optimised for the mobile - text is too small to read, navigation is very unfriendly, images misalligned and payments onerous.
PayPal has created a solution for businesses selling online using open source platforms (eg. Zencart, OS Commerce & Magento) to easily convert their desktop based site to a mobile optimised version, complete with a shopping cart and and easy payment process.
Already 500 businesses have a newly created mobile store thanks to this method. Results have been outstanding: over an 8 month period, mobile sales have increased 300% and bounce rates reduced from typically over 60% to less than 20%.
Businesses simply visit a purpose built website, enter their own URL, give a one time permission to set up mobile payments and back end/CRM conversion and the process is complete.
Whenever a mobile customer now visits their site, they will see the mobile optimised version: big images, easy navigation, simple shopping cart and payment. This all means the customer can easily find what they want and proceed thru the purchase process. Both Paypal and credit card options are offerred to the customer.

Project Innovation / Need

Mobile Commerce in a Box gives a merchant using a suitable open source type shopping cart (Zencart, OS Commerce & Magento) a simple solution to create a mobile website version of their site, thus saving them many thousands of dollars.
Many retailers using Open Source are SMBs and dont have the budget to create a mobile site.
The process is very straightforward. The merchant simply enters their website URL to get started. PayPal does most of the back-end conversion automatically. The merchant also has the option to download a plug-in version if they wish to have more control over the process.
The newly created m-site has the ability to take payments via both PayPal and credit cards. Payments feed straight into the merchants existing account. Orders also feed into the existing systems so that no additional work is required (eg. inventory and shipping is handled in the same way that their existing online store is).

User Experience

Our telesales team call the potential mobile merchant to give them an understanding of the solution. Interested merchants are sent an email with a link to the website (http://www.paypal-apac.com/minabox/)
that contains a lot of background information plus a link to Get Started. Those merchants who dont self onboard within 72 hours are called by PayPal tech support to walk them thru the process. Once successful, they are sent an email advising of the successful conversion along with a link to reverse the process should they ever wish to.
It is important that the merchant understands they need to give permission to access their back end and to set up mobile payments. This is all done in a secure fashion so that no details are shared or stored.
The whole conversion process takes under 20 minutes and the mobile then becomes immediately available for mobile shoppers.

Project Marketing

The website itself is a key part of the marketing as it contains supporting information on: Why mCommerce, Benefits of the solution, Before & After images and how to Get Started. See PayPal already has a list of over 10,000 PayPal merchants who use one of the required Open Source shopping carts so our approach is very targeted. Our telesales team call the potential mobile merchant to give them an understanding of the solution. The call to action is to "Mobilise for Xmas Now!" as we know from experience that the bulk of trading is done in the xmas shopping period.
Interested merchants are sent an email with a link to the website that contains a lot of background information plus a link to Get Started. Those merchants who dont self onboard within 72 hours are called by PayPal tech support to walk them thru the process. Once successful, they are sent an email advising of the successful conversion along with a link to reverse the process should they ever wish to.