Mobi-Cart

So, I stumbled across this the other day, its a free m-commerce app for the ipod/ipad/android phone.

It’s called Mobi-Cart, My boss has been talking about wanting to do an iphone app for quite a while now, as an extension of the website, I wanted to look into it a little further to see if I would even stand a hope in hells chance of being able to make an app that could do such a thing and I stumbled across this, its a brand new app, but it looks like it could pretty much be the future of m-commerce, if it works as good as it looks, then there is no reason for me to even attempt making one! this looks like it does it all, and it looks to be really well put together, check out the screen shot below.

mobi cart store

see the whole flickr set here for even more pictures of the app in action in a demo store.

Unfortunately, as the app is very new, there isn’t much info out on it at the moment, at present it is fully working, but you have to sign up to be able to start playing round with it, and I hate signing up for things I don’t know anything about, so as yet my research has been quite limited. Also, you have to pay $99 to get it submitted to apple so it can be placed into itunes, where this is a small price to pay for a business compaired to the potential return, its not something I really want to fork out (or even ask my boss to fork out), when I have very little info on the product.

At present you also have to add products manually using an online form, which, considering our website has over 7500 products, that isn’t going to be an option. For a small business, it could be perfect now just the way it is, or even just for the less tech savvy among us, who want an easy way to be able to sell products, with a cutting edge piece of tech for a bargain price.

There is a scheduled API release due this month, but, thats already been put back twice now, and even so I don’t know if we could link it to our database easily. So, I think I’m going to have to wait a while to see if this takes off, it looks amazing though, but then again so do so many other things that turn out not to work.

Only time will tell on this one I think, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that its a winner!