Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Adventures in Cell Phone Shopping

A long boring wait at a doctors' office with only back issues of Golfer's Digest and AARP Magazine had me desperate to pass the time while my husband had out patient surgery. I had my trusty Samsung Plum cell phone with T-mobile service and their T-zones, so I was looking at movies times and the BORING amazon.com interface when I realized that I could put in actual website URLs in a section of the screen. Wow. The first thing I did was put in www.etsy.com, a site where I buy and sell handmade crafts. Not too good. But I was not about to give up so I tried a couple more sites and here is my rating of each site with a list of their best features and a letter grade. I plan on doing more experimenting so check back for more of my Adventures.
Note: I did not actually checkout with any of my items so I am not sure how paypal's interface works, but that will be for another article!

Etsy.com:
This was the first site I visited and it was a total wash. You could not view shop products, you could barely view the shop banners. You really couldn't see ANYTHING. I believe most of the problems are because the site relies heavily upon flash and it is just not compatible with my cell phone browser. So no shopping of any kind here. Rating F

MintD.com:
On to the next shop. I was pleasantly surprised at how clean and clear this shop looked. It is a marked improvement over their regular website which seem a bit cluttered. Easy to use and easy to shop. The pictures took a bit to load but, man oh man, they were awesome and I was clicking on items to put in my cart like nobody's business. I could use every aspect of this site on my cell phone including the forums and the lookbooks and was extremely pleased with the experience. I highly recommend it. Rating A+

SmashingDarling.com
The last shop I looked at was very nice also. More cluttered than MintD, it was also a bit harder to navigate, but you could get to the shops, look at the products and put them in your cart. Definitely a good shopping experience that I will do again. Rating B

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