A Retail Path Forward
A Retail Path Forward | [email protected] 2
MOBILE RETAIL 1.0 –
WHERE WE WERE
Mobile Retail 1.0 was about fast time to market. Responsive site design became priority while purchasing was an afterthought. Mobile games and gimmicks were developed to engage customers, ignoring brand, voice and vision. Mobile sites were subsets of function if functional at all. During the holiday season, they often were forgotten, leading to disappointing numbers and the assumption that conversions would not be strong on mobile. Then something happened. Some retailers took the extra step and created great mobile experiences. Some retailers even showed greater conversion rates for mobile shoppers than desktop shoppers. The reality of those rates gave birth to Mobile Retail 2.0.
MOBILE RETAIL 2.0 –
WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW?
• 4 in 10 Smartphone users
search for an
item while in a store.
- Smarter Analytics Live 2013: Valeria Walshe, IBM, August 2013
• 90% of Smartphone users
use their phone
for pre-shopping activities.
- Mobile In-Store Research, Google Shopper Marketing Council, April 2013
• 80% of Smartphone users
use their phone
at least 15 minutes in a store.
- Mobile In-Store Research, Google Shopper Marketing Council, April 2013
• 53% of Walmart.com’s 400 million page views
on 2012 Black Friday came from mobile devices.
- Digby.com/mobile-statistics January 2013 (Luxurydaily.com)
90% OF
SMARTPHONE
USERS
USE
THEIR PHONE FOR
PRE-SHOPPING
ACTIVITIES
Retailers need to engage customers with a great mobile experience while also delivering a great desktop ecommerce experience. How can they deliver both? How can they optimize the mobile channel? The most common response these days is,
“I will build a responsive site.”
Responsive web design is the third most popular buzzword behind “mobile” and “omni-channel” in Retail. Responsive web design is the future, not just a fad for smaller stores. Content management systems now are positioned to deliver adaptive content to responsive sites. But, big bang commerce sites are difficult and aditionally are problematic to deploy. So, how does a retailer deliver an exceptional user experience
iteratively for success?
RESPONSIVE
WEB DESIGN
IS THE FUTURE,
NOT JUST A FAD
FOR SMALLER
STORES.
A PATH FORWARD
This approach enables retailers to iteratively develop a responsive interface across device form factors. The guiding principles of this approach are:
• Maintain an exceptional omni-channel shopping experience
• Lower total cost of ownership by building on a single code base
• Maintain a single brand, voice and vision throughout all sites
• Position for device-specific inn vations through an installable hybrid application
We recommend that retailers start with their mobile phone website and installable apps fi st. Thanks to the extreme differences in phone sizes and orientation, most mobile phone sites need to be responsive. Mobile phone sites often have significantly l wer feature sets when compared to desktop sites, which allows for a faster time to market on the fi st responsive site and allows retailers to iterate towards the tablet and desktop full site goal. We have successfully deployed major mobile commerce retail sites in 3 months, allowing for the fi st plunge towards
A Retail Path Forward | [email protected] 4
PointSource believes this is the best approach to responsive web design that results in low total cost of ownership. PointSource also recommends that installable applications can easily be created after delivering the mobile phone website and in parallel to the mobile tablet website creation.
ADVANTAGES OF THE INSTALLABLE
APPLICATION STRATEGY
In order to take advantage of native device capabilities, PointSource believes that most stores will have an installable application for their most loyal customers. Some capabilities expected within these installable applications include:
• Offline st age of loyalty cards, coupons and promotions
• Offline ommunity building allowing users to submit photos, videos, and reviews offli
• Push notifications or special targeted marketing messages, using services such as IBM Xtify
• Native barcode scanning
There are also many retailer-specific capabilities that a e available to engage customers. One of the benefits f building your application on a hybrid application development code base is that the mobile commerce web store can easily be built into an installable application. This allows for an increased level of customer engagement. It also affords the retailer freedom to seamlessly turn customer product browsing into a buying opportunity for increased conversion rates. Using IBM Worklight’s platform, the web artifacts within your installable application can be updated without a full download of the application and the installable application can stay in sync with the website capabilities.
ALTERNATIVES
Retailers such as QVC are aiming at fi st providing a responsive cart and checkout and moving out from there. This is a good strategy for lowering lost conversions at the bottom of the funnel based on bad checkout experiences, but still assumes there is a good path to get to the cart and check systems. Another possible alternative that is popular is to adjust the current desktop site to become responsive. PointSource recommends against this approach, because most desktop site designs do not consider mobile. PointSource recommends a mobile fi st redesign.
Big bang commerce deployments are also a possibility but traditionally have been difficult to man e and deploy. PointSource believes that through agile iterations, a better site can be accomplished in the same timeframe.
POINTSOURCE CURRENCY,
A MOBILE COMMERCE SOLUTION
PointSource has created a mobile commerce solution to accelerate the delivery of this strategy. Currency provides an infrastructure that integrates simply with various commerce systems and provides exceptional delivery for Web 2.0 single-page applications.Currency provides a reusable responsive UI library
that enables business users to create campaigns and
promotions with minimal IT involvement.
Currency also provides a starter store, which allows for the simple building of new page layouts and reuse of key responsive UI elements to customize pages. Currency integrates closely with various business user tools, such as IBM WebSphere Commerce Composer, to provide an easy to use WYSIWYG solution for business users to customize responsive pages on the site with minimal IT involvement. Learn more at currency.pointsource.com.
experience design and enterprise systems architecture, are what drives PointSource to raise the bar in enterprise mobility solutions across industries. Learn more about Erik and the PointSource team of mobile retail experts at www.PointSource.com.
About PointSource:
PointSource is a design and development firm omprised of insightful, inquisitive and talented mobile experts. We carefully craft mobile strategies based on user data and business requirements to create digital experiences that transform business. By partnering with
enterprises we then develop, deliver and launch those strategies. Our goal is to delight customers, enhance brands, improve productivity, create new interactions and address business needs.
Erik J Burckart, CTO Erik’s savvy for inventing solutions, combined with his background in user
