How to develop mobile commerce site?

Hello,

My client has asked me to develop a mobile site for their e-commerce business. They used Magento for their e-commerce site. I looked at different options available but can't decide what is the best. The options are:

1. Use Magento's Mobile App. This seems ok except that it's little too expensive for my client's size and we both agreed that mobile web is better for us than mobile app.

2. Use Magento's iPhone Themes. I saw that there are some themes developed for mobile phones. These costs around $150. However, we are concerned that using a template and running Magento for our mobile site would degrade the performance. My client wants the mobile site to be highly optimized and fast.

3. I can write a new web application from scratch and make it target mobile devices. In this case, I'd have to get the data from Magento either by web services or some other means.

What do you guys think is the best option? Also, are there any other alternatives that I'm not aware of?

Thank you.

Seong Bae

I'm not sure how running a pre-built mobile theme would degrade performance any more than building your own mobile theme. Although Magento is slow, wireless phone connections are generally slow too.

#2 seems like the clear choice to me given that both you and your client dislike #1. For #3, if you end up using Magento's web services you're not going to gain much, if any, performance over just building or buying a mobile Magento template.

Thanks for your thoughts. I didn't mean running a pre-built mobile theme would degrade performance. What I meant was that I'm not sure if a mobile site running Magento would perform well on mobile devices.

As for web services, I've been looking into having Magento generate data feed in either text or xml files to be consumed by a mobile web application.

Seong