Moovweb is flexible, powerful, reliable and cost-effective
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
It depends on who you are. If you are very small it won't be worth the money. If you have a very cranky site with nested tables coming out of every orifice, maybe you should look at a replatform or desktop rewrite first. If you have a site with vast numbers of custom content pages, it will work but may not be cost effective.
Moovweb is well suited to you if you need the ability to control mobile experiences and respond to changes in mobile and the demands of mobile aware executives who want to move more quickly than your current IT processes allow. It is well suited if you need something quickly but also want the option to bring mobile development and support in-house some time in the next year or two (which you should). It is well suited if your desire to improve a responsive experience has been thwarted by internal fears over the impact that it might have on desktop. It is well suited if you want to experiment on mobile but do more than just change the color of a button or make a font larger. It's very good at letting a UX team try things out and see what real customers do.