Have you Seen the New Magento Go Mobile Theme?

It has been a long time in the making, but, a few weeks ago, Magento Go deployed their Magento Go Mobile theme tool on recent stores, and, we’re loving it!

RazoyoRC, a store owned and managed by Razoyo was our first foray into applying the Magento Go mobile theme (though it no longer exists). Overall, we’re quite impressed though not blown away by the effort.

First of all, let’s make one thing clear… this is not a responsive theme, it is a completely different theme and not based on the one that you have active, you will need to style it separately.

A for Effort

The theme gets and A because it took almost no effort to set up. The Magento Go mobile theme has very few parameters and took me about 5 minutes to style to look passibly like my desktop site. You have just a few color choices and need to upload a logo. After a while, I’ll probably go back and tweak the CSS.

There is a preview that works like editing a normal Magento Go theme, and you can use the normal methods for isolating CSS paths and adding additional elements. You can even

upload Javascript files which I presume will apply only to the mobile theme, though I did not test that.

Features as Expected

The theme created what I would call a ‘familiar’ mobile site. The functional links (account, login, etc.) are stacked and accessed via the ever-familiar mobile bar stack in the upper left. The cart is next to it and has a count of the items in it. The search window sits next to it.

Top-level category navigation links are stacked for easy thumb-scrolling. Footer links are arranged into 2 columns at the bottom of the page.

One nice feature that I thought might be overlooked in a space-conscious mobile design is maintaining the email-subscription link in the footer. However, it is there. Nice one!

Category pages include a small, mobile-optimized image of the product for quick loading and stack nicely making for easy one-thumb navigation on an iPhone. Don’t be tempted to shop while driving, though!

Room to Improve

No ‘click to call’. While I have a phone number in my configuration and it is displayed on my home page, there is no button for the customer to click through to it to call. I can probably fix this, but, this is one of those sine-qua-non features for mobile shoppers.

Magento logo in lower-left corner cannot be easily removed. I’m sure I will take care of this with CSS when I get around to it, but, it is annoying. It’s my store, not theirs.

Razoyo only links to our home page on our house accounts (i.e., stores we manage).

Using PayPal on checkout was a disappointment. Given that Magento and PayPal are sister companies, I would have expected checking out with PayPal to take me to a mobile-optimized payment screen. No such luck. Pinch and zoom city.

One critical flaw is that the mobile design applies to tablet-surfing as well, but is not tablet-optimized. Thus, the user is presented with a table experience that is worse than not having a mobile theme at all. Given the preponderance of couch-shopping today, this is a big miss and will be the impetus to not apply the design. If Magento is not going to provide a tablet experience as part of the theme there should be a way to have the theme apply only to mobile devices with screens smaller than 3" in width (or less than 325 px wide).

Overall

SaaS platform mobile eCommerce tends to disappoint. I would say that Magento’s has some great features. They have the ability to customize with CSS and add custom Javascript. This makes it the best I’ve seen so far from the big players. Oh, and it is free! ‘Nuff said.

If they can fix the tablet issue, I would give this mobile theme a A overall, but, as is, it’s a B+.