Mobile Commerce

Department store chain Neiman Marcus is driving traffic to its brick-and-mortar locations and e-commerce site by promoting an ongoing sale through a mobile banner advertisement found on Condé Nast's Vanity Fair mobile site. Neiman Marcus’ banner ad is meant to publicize its sales effort while also allowing consumers to locate the nearest store. Mobile ads that drive purchases in addition to foot traffic can be beneficial for retailers to bring consumers into the store.

Retail, a gala event where consumer meets product, has been the heart of our economic fabric for hundreds of years. From the markets and bazaars of antiquity to mass merchant mega chains of today, the basic principles have remained the same: get customers into the store, in front of the items they want and up to the counter for purchase. While these tenets will never change, an increasingly costly war with e-commerce has forced retailers to innovate to survive, using mobile technologies to "enhance and personalize" the shopping experience.

Omnichannel is the buzzword du jour in retailing. From large chains to midsize independents, brands across the retail industry are eager to leverage new digital opportunities as drivers of increased revenues and market expansion. But while many retailers are talking about omnichannel opportunities, a much smaller number understand what omnichannel really means.

It looks like mobile will be the biggest Christmas present retailers will get this holiday season, according to recently relased survey findings from personalized customer experience solutions provider Baynote and e-commerce consulting firm the e-tailing group. One in three retailers forecast that mobile will drive more than 10 percent of their total holiday revenue this year.

L'Oreal has teamed with Walgreens and Duane Reade locations in Manhattan for a mobile coupon campaign aimed at solving mobile advertising's fundamental problem: connecting mobile ads to real-world purchases.The campaign involves ad tech startup Sparkfly serving L'Oreal product coupons within popular women's beauty app Pretty in my Pocket (PRIMP), which are then redeemed at Walgreens or Duane Reade stores in New York's Manhattan borough.

shopkick, the iOS and Android app that lets users search for products, find out where they're sold, and then automatically get checked in at retail locations for discounts to buy them in-store, is making another move that widens its remit beyond simply driving more bricks-and-mortar business. The startup is launching in-app purchases, starting with 30 major stores that were already a part of shopkick's product aggregation platform, including Target, Macy's, Best Buy, Old Navy and Anthropologie.

No, it isn't just you and the sites you happen to try on your tablet. Retailers are behind the curve when it comes to optimizing across all of the major screens from which people access their sites. According to L2's most recent monitoring of 71 specialty retailers, only White House | Black Market and H&M actually optimize their sites for tablet use. The rest shuffle the tablet user off to the standard desktop experience, complete with the finger-challenging buttons and drop-down menus, legal document text, and touch unfriendliness.

Square introduced an online marketplace on Wednesday, which lets merchants open up virtual stores for free to list goods and services. The move marks Square's first venture into e-commerce and may help establish the startup as useful for businesses looking to both process payments and attract new customers. "Creating an online marketplace is our next step in making commerce easy for everyone," said Ajit Varma, Square's director of discovery, in a statement. "Square Market makes local businesses accessible to customers down the block and across the country."

One of the most dramatic effects of the new mobility is that traditional behaviors are no longer tied to familiar time and place constraints. In fact, they may not even be tied to a consumer's own familiar brands. The internet may have made shopping available to consumers 24/7 on the desktop, but devices have now made every moment everywhere shoppable. Wal-Mart Canada seems ready to grasp this opportunity of the always-shopping consumer by putting a buy button in an unlikely place — a bus shelter.

Only a few years have passed since retailers finally became comfortable with their transformation to e-tailers. Now they must shift their point of view again, becoming what we might call "see-tailers," as the physical retail store assumes the role of a showroom, with consideration selection and transactions all conducted online through smartphone apps or mobile websites. Rather than visit stores to compare prices or find new styles and products, consumers are using stores to see, touch, taste or smell a product they've already targeted, then are leaving to order the item online.