Don’t Forget Data Entry With M-Commerce

Retailers have spent millions of dollars and countless hours ensuring consumers are able to view pages and navigate their e-commerce site on a mobile device. This is all very well, but the minute a consumer decides to make a purchase it becomes clear that the attitude of facilitating mobile commerce hasn't yet permeated to the checkout page. Consumers are still required to enter their billing and delivery address details on an awkward mobile keypad or screen, making the risk of lost patience and abandoned carts very real.

Ensure that your website is sufficiently geared up to allow for not only smooth presentation and use, but also effective and rapid online data entry before you put all your eggs in the m-commerce basket.

Just Not Thinking
M-commerce is a massive opportunity for retailers, but the potential to get it wrong is enormous. Get it right by allowing customers to easily enter their name, email address, home address and payment details. Get it wrong by expecting them to type several lines of address details on a tiny screen keypad and a market set to explode will pass you by.

With a small screen and keyboard, it can be incredibly difficult to enter several lines of an address on a mobile device. Even if completed, the opportunity for people to make mistakes is very high. This likelihood only increases in the gifting market, where customers aren't always completely sure of the recipient’s full address.

Mobile web and application developers should therefore be looking for ways to make it easy for retail customers to input and verify address details, such as ZIP code lookup software, where the simple entry of a ZIP code results in an address being pre-populated. This instantly removes the need to enter full data and also provides a verification process between ZIP code and intended address.

Reduce Errors and Improve Loyalty
Without ease of data entry, patience will wear thin and customers will abandon their cart in favor of either waiting to use a different device or using a competitor’s site. As a demonstration of the degree of ease that such an approach can deliver, using ZIP code address lookup alone removes on average of 80 percent of the keystrokes required to input an address, according to Marketing Sherpa.

In addition, there's another long-term benefit. The opportunity to verify an address means that payments are less likely to be refused when the billing details are incorrect, incurring the lack of patience problem again.

If the wrong delivery address is entered, there's only one possible outcome. The shipment won't arrive, meaning the shopper, unlikely to blame herself, will point the finger at the retailer which failed to deliver their goods. To provide some scale to the problem, Royal Mail has a depot where packages which cannot be delivered due to inaccurate addressing are sent — 70,000 undeliverable items are sent every day.

Don’t Miss
After spending millions of dollars and countless hours getting your mobile website up and running, fine-tuned to perform well and easily accessible through new technology such as QR codes, you may be tempted to just allow the usual online payment processes to be replicated.

But mobile devices aren't the same as PCs. The two channels have to be considered separately, despite their obvious similarities. The data input difficulty alone renders a duplication of approach fundamentally undermined, meaning retailers run the risk of lost customers and undeliverable items hitting their bottom line and damaging their brand reputation.

Give consumers a convenient, seamless service from arrival at your site all the way through to purchase. This ensures the shopping experience is as practical on the move as it is in their home. Customers will return and you won’t drive them into the hands of your nearest rival.

Emma Gooderham is managing director of World Addresses. Emma can be reached at emma.gooderham@worldaddresses.com.