Moovweb is flexible, powerful, reliable and cost-effective
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Modules Used
- Most
Overall Satisfaction with Moovweb
We are a development partner for Moovweb, having built a number of major mobile sites using the technology, including Gymboree, Tractor Supply, Kirkland's, Bass Pro and a bunch of others.
I'm not a Moovweb employee, but I do work closely with a lot of the Moovweb team and as a major partner I'm involved in a lot of their product roadmap conversations. I have a lot of experience with the platform and what it can do, but I'm not an entirely neutral observer here. However a lot of my own company's reputation is staked on their technology working. I'm not sitting here recommending it if it doesn't.
Moovweb solves a bunch of different business problems in my view. If you don't have mobile and need it quick, Moovweb's approach - using a desktop site as a "source" and transforming it on the fly is quick and cost effective and robust and minimizes IT resource. If you have a mobile site, maybe a clunky responsive site, it's a good way of getting control of the UI and optimizing it. If you need an app it’s a good way of getting core E-Commerce content into it. Fundamentally it's an effective way of exploiting your desktop content in a range of situations and separating the visual output from the heavy-lifting on your back end.
- Quick to implement. You don't have to reengineer things to get your desktop content and transform it for whatever you need to do with it (mobile, apps, tablet, instore). You don;t have to get IT involved til the end if you don;t want to.
- Flexible: We build sites using Moovweb but we can often hand them over for maintenance to internal teams. So you haven't handed your mobile project over to a vendor with a black box. You can take control of the work done for you on Moovweb any time you want, assuming you have an intermediate level JS developer hanging around the place.
- Cost effective: Once you've got Moovweb going as a presentation layer above desktop, there's a lot you can do. We've built in-store experiences for customers in two weeks. We can build full ecommerce capable apps in four. We do tablet optimizations in as little as three weeks. We have a run a series of A/B tests for retailers over a six month span. After that initial investment, it's cheap to keep doing more and more.
- Proven: It helps me sleep at night knowing that the technology we are building for clients is being called upon to deliver 2 billion mobile page views a month. I don't really want cutting edge in a platform, I want reliability.
- Maintainable: We can maintain mobile for a big complex ecommerce engine like Websphere or ATG with less than 3-10 hours of work a month, even where IT teams have month-long sprints and teams of engineers changing the site constantly. Most of what IT teams do doesn't affect us - most of their work just flows through. That makes life easy either for us, or for clients who maintain it i-house, which a lot of the vanguard ecommerce players are doing nowadays with this kind of platform. We just support and consult as needed.
- They have built a scripting language, Tritium, that is a useful tool, but hasn't really caught fire among developers. It's easy to understand and use (very jquery like) and it's good for what it does. But I think some teams get confused and think that it's a whole new programming language to learn. I don't know whether it delivers enough value.
- I'd like to see them push an entry level package so they can be accessible to a broader range of ecommerce players, particularly smaller retailers.
- Better conversion rates. I haven't worked on a project where there was no improvement on conversion. Worst case I have worked on 5%, (outlier) best case +100%. That may not be the platform's doing - my team have been working in mobile UX for a long time and know what works - but the platform enables us to do what we do and improve the experience. It's a lot harder and more expensive without it.
- Better insights. Once you can experiment more you can learn what works and doesn't for customers quickly. Again, the platform isn't doing that without the help of good people knowing what to experiment with, but compared to other optimization products we've found this high powered, easy to understand, and cost effective.
- Better processes. We've been able to do much more to help clients build a rhythm of testing into their mobile and app development and support because Moovweb is pretty easy to work with.
Usablenet, Branding Brand, Skava etc. Though they are usually in the same conversations when it comes to mobile the key question to ask is whether you can ever take over your own site if you are unhappy with their services, and the answer is that you can;t. That would keep me away from them. Usablenet's reputation is for cheap upfronts and then a stream of SoWs and Change Orders every time you want to do anything. Branding Brand has an awesome customer base but if you;re not going to be one of their top 5 clients, they tend to struggle to support you. My team has worked with ex-customers of both Usablenet and Branding Brand and transitioned them to Moovweb and they are happy with the switch.
Using Moovweb
- Rapid mobile implementations
- New product prototypes where content can be derived from desktop web.
- Cost effective app development using Moovweb to supply content from desktop as webview
- Tablet optimization
- A/B testing
- In-store kiosks
- We have actually used it to allow customers to get a new desktop site without altering their backend. You essentially use the desktop as a skeleton source but direct traffic to a Moovwebbed version of that desktop site. It's useful when a customer just doesn't want to touch their back end system but can't control the experience in the way they want.
- In-store kiosks. Again, we were asked to create a kiosk experience from the desktop rather than expensively develop a kiosk only experience from scratch.
- Future gadgets and devices that we don't even know about yet. If I know what they were we'd plan for them, but Moovweb at least means that we can probably rely on using desktop assets for whatever end-point we need to service for customers.
Evaluating Moovweb and Competitors
Moovweb Implementation
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
- Moving target. The single biggest issue during implementation is usually a radical change on the desktop that wasn't outlined at the beginning of the project.