Hello,
We're about to launch a mobile version of our eCommerce website to distribute travel products in North America.
Some folks in my company are asking that we prevent users surfing on a desktop browser from accessing our mobile website.
Their goal is to reduce risks from Credit Card fraud. In the past, we've dealt with fraudsters who used stolen credit card to book from Europe products on our site. As a result, we've made the fraud verification rule more strict on our desktop website which makes it difficult from users to book from outside North America.
But since the mobile site was designed in part to sell to North American travelers while they are traveling abroad, we will have to make the fraud checks less strict on the mobile site in order not to prevent those legitimate sales from taking place. Therefore, it has been suggested that we should prevent desktop users from accessing our mobile site in order to make it more challenging for fraudsters to access our mobile site, and potentially discover that the security rules have been relaxed.
I tend to think that this measure would unfairly penalize legitimate users who have a good reason of wanting to access the mobile website from any browser, including desktop computers, but I am looking for good arguments to build my case.
So far, I have only found one tidbit of information Google's Webmaster Blog.
On the other hand, when there's an access to a mobile-version URL from a desktop browser or by our web crawler, Googlebot, it's not necessary to redirect them to the desktop-version. For instance, Google doesn't automatically redirect desktop users from their mobile site to their desktop site, instead they include a link on the mobile-version page to the desktop version. These links are especially helpful when a mobile site doesn't provide the full functionality of the desktop version -- users can easily navigate to the desktop-version if they prefer.
[
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com ]
What would the Webmasterworld community suggest as a response to this problem?
Thank you in advance for your contributions.
Lothaire
