With 77% of retail chains seeing high value in mobile commerce, many say their top priority in 2010 is giving smartphone shoppers better access to their online stores. With this in mind, Philadelphia-based Monetate has launched Monetate Mobile, a new product that can provide existing retail web sites with mobile-native navigation and location-based features like a GPS-based store locator, deployed overnight, using just one line of JavaScript.

Monetate Mobile is being launched at eTail West, a leading industry event for senior-level retail marketing and e-commerce executives. The product currently supports iPhone, iPod touch, and Android, with additional platforms to be added shortly.

According to Monetate co-founder and CEO, David Brussin, e-commerce sites will find installation of Monetate Mobile both quick and painless.

"We can install Monetate Mobile for retailers overnight," says Brussin. "Because we've spent several years refining the technology needed to add new marketing capabilities to web sites, it was a natural progression for us to tackle the urgent dilemma faced by retailers who need to cater to the surging number of smartphone shoppers."

According to Brussin many retailers are torn between building and maintaining separate, mobile-friendly versions of their regular web stores, or making a big investment in platform-specific shopping apps.

"We think Monetate Mobile offers a compelling alternative," says Monetate's co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer, David Bookspan. "Monetate technology detects smartphone visitors in real time and responds accordingly, presenting a Smart Bar that floats over the regular web store when that store is viewed on a smartphone."

Buttons on the Smart Bar offer direct access to features like searching, browsing, shopping cart, and store location which uses smartphone GPS to quickly guide shoppers to the nearest store. The Smart Bar can also be customized, says Bookspan: "For clients who have no brick-and-mortar stores, the Store Locator spot is available for other functions such as highlighting new arrivals or special offers."

Describing the thinking behind Monetate Mobile, Brussin says, "Access to full websites is what has made mobile interesting and smartphone phone shoppers want the full web, not an overly simplified '2nd class citizen' mobile site."

Brussin points out that Monetate Mobile provides the full web for smartphone shoppers while at the same time helping retailers to avoid creating a separate site. "That means all the investments of your main site, like marketing campaigns, merchandising, recommendations, reviews, and so on, are leveraged for mobile visitors, plus you eliminate the cost of maintaining two sites."