In addition to recently beginning to sell iPhones, the world’s biggest retailer – Walmart – has now got an iPhone optimized web site …
And a very good one at that. Well, I should qualify this right off by saying that it’s a very good one IF you like iPhone optimized pages. I like them very much. The glory of seeing the real internet notwithstanding, I find it much easier to work with sites that are specially (and intelligently) formatted for the iPhone – sue me 🙂
Read on for some reasons why I like the Walmart iPhone site an lots of screencaps …
The Walmart iPhone site’s home page presents you with 3 simple navigation choices – Products, Holiday Specials, and Prescriptions (as shown in the screencap at the top of this post). I think these may change regularly, as they were different when Joe first posted on the new iPhone site.
In addition, there are four navigation buttons that stay constantly on the primary top nav bar – Home, Shopping List, Store Finder, and Search. The Products section offers big, clean buttons to tap for individual product categories:
As you drill down through a main section (Products for example), you also get a further status bar just below the top nav bar, which shows the page you’re currently on and the position within the hierarchy of sections – and you can tap on the words to move back up the hierarchy (on Electronics for example, in the screencap below):
Pages load smoothly and pretty quickly, with only a very occasional hickup:
The Store Finder works well, and the Shopping List feature actually seems pretty handy, and is easy to use:
Same goes for the product search ability. A search for iPhone today brought up a range of relevant accessories – though interestingly, no actual iPhones (guess maybe this hasn’t been updated since they started selling iPhones last Sunday):
Individual product pages are also done well:
So there’s a lot that I like about the Walmart iPhone site. There are also a couple of things that I don’t like at all though. The first is that it seems that to buy anything, you are always forced across to the full site. That strikes me as awkward and more than a little surprising as the site’s been up nearly two months. The other is that there is no big / bold / easy link to switch to the full site. I know there are lots of folks who do not appreciate iPhone optimized sites, and one of the golden rules of optimizing sites for iPhone is (or should be) making it dead simple to switch back and forth between optimized and full versions.
Overall, the Walmart iPhone site is very nice to use. If you’re a big Walmart shopper and you’re Ok with optimized sites, this is a very good one to bookmark.
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
TAGS: Walmart
