General Question

Buttonstc's avatar

How easy or difficult is it for a business to offer customers the choice of the regular website rather than the mobile version?

Asked by Buttonstc (27605points) December 26th, 2012 from iPhone

I’m assuming that offering people that choice is not all that difficult since most websites do. But if that’s not the case I’d be interested to know why.

Hopefully some of our excellent Fluther techy types can drop me a clue.

My favorite grocery store (Meijer) switched about a year ago and I’m completely baffled by why a business would be willing to lose money consistently over something this obvious.

I used to be able to access the weekly sales paper with each page looking exactly as it would look if I were holding it in my hands.

Then they switched to where iphone was FORCED into the mobile version.

But the Acer tablet could still get the HTML version from the drop down menu option of “display as desktop”.

But around 6 months later, it too was forced into the mobile version regardless of which options were tried on both the site or the tablet.

And the same is true on the Samsung Galaxy Tab as well.

Paging through their clunky mobile version (58 pages this week) takes SOOO MUCH LONGER than looking at each page of the sale paper ( even with all the zooming in and out).

In this past year I can count on my fingers the times I’ve gone to Meijers and it’s really a shame.

And I’m certainly not the only one. Why would they (apparently) be so willing to lose business rather than give their customers the OPTION of viewing the website in whichever version is the most convenient for them as they used to?

How hard could that be?

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1 Answer

dabbler's avatar

Some websites do offer you the option to go to their regular website when a ‘mobile device’ has been detected and they have sent you to the shrunken version.
I’ve seen that option on my tablet a few times and depending on what I’m looking at I’ll usually opt for the full-size site since the tablet presents that pretty well.
On a phone it might be tough to view the regular site properly but it shouldn’t hurt to give you the option.
It’s just a link they can provide easily, that overrides the mobile version.

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