Responsive e-commerce design

To inform one of the responsive projects that cxpartners are working on I pulled together a list of responsive e-commerce sites. I was curious to see what other people were up to and how they had tackled the shopping experience across devices.

There are only a few examples out there, and none from a major retailer (as far as I could find).

I don't think we should be surprised by that. It will take a while for responsive e-commerce sites to filter through (and of course become supported and recommended by some of the big e-commerce platforms), and equally unless a design or reworking of a store is being planned then there won't be much impetus to move away from the current set-up of separate desktop and mobile experiences. Also worth noting that responsive sites are typically cheaper to build and maintain than two separate sites, and so the systems integrators won't necessarily be supportive of the move.

But the benefits of supporting one front-end codebase are there, and in our initial prototypes we've see that it's possible to have a fully featured e-commerce site that is well optimised to the different devices and input methods. It's also worth noting that Google has now recommended responsive design as it's preferred way of developing mobile sites (one site to index without duplicating content must be a good thing).

So here are the few sites that I've dug up. Some were mentioned on forums, others from mentions on twitter, and a couple just from looking around and playing. Thanks to all those places and the people that pointed me in the right direction.

Have a play, see what you think and feel free to comment with suggestions for improvements and examples of further sites.

http://www.nuts.com (no, not that nuts...)

http://tattly.com

http://www.fivesimplesteps.com

http://wearyoubelong.com

http://www.kingofnothing.com.au/shop/mens/

http://www.unitedpixelworkers.com

http://hiutdenim.co.uk

http://folksy.com/ (thanks to Stu)

http://saltsurf.com/ (thanks to Luke)

http://sugru.com/ (thanks to Bash, and recently used successfully by Giles on his iPhone)

http://www.currys.co.uk

Finally, http://thomsonsport.com which cxpartners designed and was implemented by their super talented team.