Unprepared For Mobile Commerce

By Erin Harris, Editor-In-Chief, Cell & Gene
Follow Me On Twitter @ErinHarris_1

July 2016 Innovative Retail Technologies

I’ve spent a lot of time on the road over the past several weeks attending various industry events, and one of the major topics discussed at all of them has been the evolving role of personalization in omni-channel retailing. From an e-commerce perspective especially, the retail industry has defined personalization in various ways. For us, personalization means capitalizing on the consumer’s countless daily mobile moments by delivering real-time, predictive experiences via machine learning and design thinking. In other words, to truly personalize the customer’s journey, retailers must serve up contextually relevant information that fits her wherever she is in that moment.

But as I sat through all the informative sessions on evolving and disruptive ways to enhance the customer’s shopping journey, I couldn’t help but be concerned over the fact that many omni-channel retailers haven’t gotten their hands around mobile commerce (mCommerce), let alone the various features and functionalities that will personalize the experience. If the user is unable to easily load the page, navigate the site, search for products, and conduct a transaction, all the personalization features money can buy won’t make a difference because she will have abandoned your site for another retailer who’s laid the fundamental mCommerce groundwork.

The stats don’t lie. Sixty-four percent of smartphone users expect a site to load in 4 seconds or less. And one in four shoppers abandons her cart if the site’s navigation is too complex. According to Criteo, consumers tend to view the same number of products on smartphone and desktop, yet the add-to-basket rate and purchase rate are lower on mobile. This suggests that completing a purchase is often not sufficiently simple. Internet Retailer tells us that 50 percent of e-commerce traffic during the 2015 holiday was driven by mobile, and more than one quarter of all transactions took place on a mobile device. Indeed, consumers are demanding a comprehensive mobile shopping experience, with 60 percent using mobile internet to make decisions in a store or while shopping online, 40 percent using mobile applications to make shopping decisions, and 37 percent using a mixture of the two. In other words, consumers want and expect dedicated mCommerce, but many retailers simply aren’t yet ready for it. Retailers don’t have a choice in the matter — they must be able to broadly adapt to any mobile channel that their consumers decide to use. Period.

Laying The MCommerce Groundwork
A recent report from Pure Oxygen Labs found that fewer than 20 percent of retailers on Internet Retailer’s Top 500 list use responsive web design (RWD). This approach uses a single website to provide a consistent view across all devices: desktops, tablets, and phones. The same content and function are delivered to each device, but the layout adapts depending on the size and nature of the individual device. There’s some argument about whether RWD or building and maintaining an altogether separate, mobile-optimized mCommerce site is the most efficient way to deliver content to mobile users. That’s fodder for another column.

What’s not debatable is that mobile commerce is your next big opportunity, whether you’re ready for it or not. The good news is that there are technologies that, in one shot, will help retailers implement both the mCommerce fundamentals and layer on the much-needed predictive experiences your customers expect. Whatever path you take to personalizing the customer experience via those precious mobile moments, make sure it’s paved with a solid mCommerce foundation.