1. Cam Fortin
Senior Director of Product Development
M-sites vs. Apps
When does a site work and when is an app the
better approach?
2. • The leading and only national online wine store
• Founded in 1998 and acquired the Wine.com
name in 2002
• Our business:
− Customers: consumers (novice through collector),
corporate accounts and partner websites
− Products: bottles, gifts, clubs, and futures – from
$6 to $6k
− Purchase occasions: everyday consumption,
collecting and gifting
2
Who We Are
4. Source: Euromonitor, Forrester Research. Wine.com estimates of 2% online wine penetration based on $200M online wine retail
estimate and $10B target market (off premise, over $7/bottle).
4
Online Wine Market – lots of room for
growth!
1% 2%
9%
15%
24%
58%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
(online share of retail spending)Online penetration by retail category
Total
retail
8%
Total retail
8-10%
5. World is going mobile, and Wine.com is going mobile
even faster (38% mobile traffic, up from 27% a year ago!)
5
April
12
April
13
Other
Mobile
6%
9%
iPhone
10%
17%
iPad
11%
12%
Desktop
73%
62%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Wine.com
Traffic
by
Device
Type
6. App or m site?
Unfortunately, the answer is “it depends”, maybe “both”
and one likely answer isn’t even in the question…
• What are you selling?
• How do customers engage with your brand?
• How do they find you?
• How often do they buy and visit?
• What functionality do you want to offer?
• How large is your development team and what
technologies do they know?
8. Wine.com chose an app for iPad and
an m. site for Wine.com (so far)
Why an m site for phones?
• Cohesive experience for multi-device user
• Many “1 and done” gifters who would never download an app
• We rely heavily on search and email for customer acquisition
• Older demographic who are used to sites not apps
• We wanted our first mobile presence to be commerce based
• Works on all phones, not just built for iOS (although that’s where the $ is!)
• Updates on our schedule
• Our team already knows web technology (3rd party built out iPad app)
• HTML5 makes a lot of “app like” behavior possible
Why an app for iPad?
• Site worked already for tablets, needed something exciting
• More screen real-estate to create interesting and unique experience
• Harness device-specific functionality (performance, camera, shake…)
• In the future we might pre-load catalogue for speed and offline usage
9. Biggest reason for going “m” site first?
Creating a cohesive customer experience!
Our customers use multiple devices to interact with us
9
Add to cart at dinner on
your phone
Open abandon cart email
on desktop the next day
Even if you just visit the desktop site, as long
as we know you, your cart is waiting!
Click through ON ANY device
and your cart is waiting
10. If you decide to go web, an “m” site
might not even be the right option!
Screen sizes and operating systems are proliferating fast
– there isn’t a “desktop” and “mobile” user
Sources: internal data, http://www.sitefinity.com/mobile/responsive-design-graph
Google is starting to penalize m sites, if paid and natural
search are important to you a responsive site might be the
answer
12. App, M site or responsive?
Pros Cons
M Sites • Specialized site for one form factor
• Straight-forward to create
• If you are a web shop, same
technology
• Less code = “Lighter”
• Faster release cycles
• Bad for SEM and SEO (Duplicated content)
• Hard to maintain two code bases, creates
Feature Divide
• Only optimized for smart phones
Responsive • Optimized mobile experience for
all devices – including ones that
don’t exist
• Paid Search and SEO friendly
• Aligned with best practices - Even
Google recommends it.
• Coexists well with Mobile Apps
• Takes more up front time to design and develop
• Performance, as sites have to perform all server
side functions, regardless of display
• Challenging to set-up, maintain and test
• Difficult to apply to large existing sites
• No unique device experiences
Apps • PUSH PUSH PUSH
• Harness all device functionality and
device specific capabilities
• Very specialized and optimized
task-focused experience
• Constant reminder of your brand/site
• Can act as user acquisition if you
show for highly searched terms
• Possible to use offline
• Users have to actively update to newer versions
• Difficult to create and must be created for
rapidly changing platforms (ios, android,
windows, blackberry)
• Harder to maintain and update, without a
dedicated team. Creates Feature Divide
• Must packaged for multiple app stores
• Sits outside the CMS
• Different analytics needed
• Barrier, as a customer must download and
install app
M and Responsive sites are generally more immediate, findable,
shareable and upgradeable.
13. What other people say
Mark, School Webmaster
“All depends on the content....if you need the functionality of the mobile device (making calls, calendar,
contacts, maps) then an app is the way to go. Otherwise, if it's a mostly static site then a responsive/
mobile site is cheaper and sufficient. (But I'm no expert...)”
Kyle, UI Design Guru
“I think each approach has its benefits and drawbacks. App benefits: increased functionality, potentially
better design (although not so much anymore given HTML5's capabilities), greater presence on user's
device. App drawbacks: barrier to entry (having to download the app), siloed from other web content
and from search entry points; more work required to develop and maintain across multiple platforms.
Mobile site benefits: easier to build and maintain across platforms, easy to keep seamless with the
desktop experience. Mobile site drawbacks: inability to fully utilize devices native functions.”
Chris, Lead PM at PeaPod
“I agree with Mark & Kyle, but there is another factor - developer resources. If I had a developer for each
platform, then building rich & native applications is definitely the way to go (again, depending on the
content). As a product manager, our focus should always be providing the best possible customer
experience to as many customers (or potential customers) as possible. What you can do these days
with HTML and Javascript is incredible, and building an app for the web allows you to create an almost-
as-good-as-native customer experience across all platforms with just one web developer. You also
have the hybrid approach (Like PetDuel) where you develop in HTML & JS but use a framework to build
multi-platform applications that have access to native APIs (like Camera, GPS, Accelerometer, etc).”
Max, Designer
“Mobile sites. There are too many apps! If the mobile site can look & work like an app that'd be best I
think. The designer can update it without everyone having to update constantly. Less clutter. My
opinion!”