September 09, 2009
Op Ed By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Today, Mac fans around the globe are eagerly awaiting Apple’s yearly music event. The event happens every fall and usually centers around updates to the iPod and new perks with iTunes. While it’s not the most likely venue for an iPhone announcement, rumors are still flying about whether Apple will announce a new partnership with Verizon in hopes of expanding the iPhone customer base.
A large majority of iPhone users have nothing bad to say about the iPhone itself, while often complaining about the service of AT&T instead. Since these users spend more time on the Internet with their phone than other Android phone owners, it is only expected that their usage would weigh down the carrier’s network. By opening up iPhone’s to the Verizon market, AT&T may see a loss in customers, but Apple will at minimum double their customer base of iPhone users. To do this, Apple will need to develope an iPhone for the Verizon network, which is a different platform than the AT&T network. Since their exclusivity contract is up with AT&T in 2010, it’s likely that, if announced today, this Verizon based iPhone has already been developed.
For the ecommerce world, an iPhone on Verizon could be a game changer. Currently, online storefronts on average have about 3-5% traffic from iPhones. If the user base doubles, it’s likely that this traffic number will double as well. With 10% of traffic coming to merchant storefronts from the iPhone, merchants should consider ways to improve their user interface for a mobile device. This is currently an untapped market of eager customers that merchants can quickly profit from simply by molding their storefront to the iPhone now, rather than later.
To stay up-to-date with today’s announcements and see what’s unveiled (an iPad, new iTunes interface, and possibly the Verizon iPhone) check in with C|Net, as they are updating viewers in real time.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
[...] confident that this will actually happen this time, as people have been disappointed already by previous rumors. AT&T and Verizon have been battling it out for years to dominate the mobile phone market, and [...]