Shoe and apparel retailer Foot Locker Inc. has made wholesale changes to three of its mobile commerce sites and added mobile web sites for three other brands.
Sharing the same technology infrastructure, the updated sites include Foot Locker, Champs Sports and CCS brands; brands with new sites include Lady Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker and Footaction.
Updated features include search functions that enable customers to filter results by gender, shoe size, price and other factors; access to VIP, Foot Locker’s loyalty program; the inclusion of customer reviews and ratings; and the ability to check in-store product availability.
The home page of the sites features a single product hero shot with top sellers below and other product categories beneath top sellers. The search box and five-button navigation bar—including Home, Products, Stores, My Account and Cart—anchor the top of the mobile home page. A shallow bar for promotional announcements rests just beneath the navigation bar.
Foot Locker’s first m-commerce sites went online in 2008. But, much has changed since then. Consumers increasingly use mobile devices for shopping, a Foot Locker spokeswoman says. “Our site presentation needed to change as well,” she says.
Mobile shoppers tend to spend less time on the mobile site than their counterparts shopping from a desktop browser, she says. Mobile shoppers use search for a large percentage of their mobile site activity, she adds.
Development started in January, with the first redesigned site launching March 8, the spokeswoman says. Foot Locker tapped Guidance Solutions Inc., which developed the company’s e-commerce sites, for mobile site development. “By using them for our mobile sites we were able to share features and functionalities between our online channels,” the spokeswoman says.
For example, Foot Locker shoppers should be able to find the same products using the same search terms on either the mobile or full-fledged e-commerce sites, she says.
Foot Locker also used for the mobile sites cascading style sheet technology to control how online elements are presented, “which allows the pages to load much faster, regardless of the speed of the wireless service the customer might be using,” the spokeswoman says. Cascading style sheet, or CSS, is a standard web page style sheet language programmers use to format the look of a page written in HTML or XML Internet languages. CSS reduces site complexity by separating content from design.