Best Buy  has rolled out a fully   commerce-enabled mobile site for its British market to support the way that customers want to shop with the electronics retailer.

Best Buy UK reports seeing a rapid shift as people use their handsets to shop and the company also predicts that more than 10 percent of its online orders will come from mobile devices within the next two years. The new mcommerce site address this growth by providing all of the benefits of Best Buy’s online store in a format designed for smaller screens.

“We have launched our dedicated mobile site in response to a shift in the way our customers want to shop,” said Matt Kelleher, multichannel director of Best Buy UK, London.

“Mobile Web sites offer a great shopping experience and now our customers have another way to buy tech quickly and conveniently,” he said.

The first Best Buy stores were opened in Britain in the spring of 2010.

A flexible approach
The retailer chose to do a mobile site because it offers more flexibility for shopping than apps.

The new mcommerce site is compatible with Android and Apple devices, as well as the majority of Windows and RIM smartphones.

Key features of the mobile site include the ability to browse by category or search the full range of online products and services, view full product descriptions and compare two products at a time.

Additionally, the site features customer reviews, access to the same promotions that are available on the main Web site, a location-mapping service and the ability to place an order on a smartphone and pick it up at a store.

Users can also track the delivery of their order and read over 400 articles.

The launch will be promoted in Best Buy’s Facebook and Twitter groups using mobile PPC, mobile display and mobile homepage takeover ads to generate traffic to product pages.

The launch will also be supported in offline collateral through the use of QR codes.

“Industry figures suggest that smartphones are set to become  the most common Web-access devices worldwide by 2013 and we expect to see over 10 percent of our online orders coming from mobile devices by then,’ Mr. Kelleher said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York