Mobile Commerce

If you've ever doubted the validity of mobile as a contributor to your bottom line, holiday season 2012 is here to disavow you of such notions. Just days into peak season, retailers were seeing record-breaking sales from mobile devices. Let's take a look at the influence of mobile during this pivotal time of year and what these trends mean for retailers.

The 2012 holiday season is in full swing, and e-commerce earnings for retailers are projected to be record breaking. IBM Smarter Commerce held a Twitter chat yesterday to recap the lessons learned, emerging trends and final results of the chaos that was Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Week. Moderated by Forrester Research Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru (@smulpuru), the chat featured Richard Feinberg (@richardfeinberg), professor of consumer sciences and retailing at Purdue University, and Jill Puleri (@jpuleri), IBM Global Retail Lead, not to mention the Twitterverse.

With the release of the latest version of its mobile app in September, overstockArt.com, an online retailer of wall art, wanted to create better engagement with customers, many of whom had already downloaded an earlier version of the company's app.

Over the past few years, Black Friday has expanded from a one-day phenomenon to a week filled with sales and pandemonium. Between this year's Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday sales, retailers had an exceptional kickoff to the 2012 holiday season. IBM reports that Black Friday sales were up 20 percent from last year and the average order value was $181.22. As for mobile commerce, the iPad generated 88.3 percent of mobile sales. 

The numbers keep rolling in: mobile commerce startup Branding Brand released new reports detailing holiday shopping sales on mobile devices, but unlike the other e-commerce reports which came out over the holidays, this one only includes data on commerce sites where the experience has been specifically tailored for smartphones. It also only looks at smartphones, to be clear, and doesn't lump tablets into the "mobile" category.

As mobile increasingly becomes a keystone in the holiday campaigns of brand marketers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, in partnership with Prosper Mobile Insights, yesterday released its second annual Mobile Shoppers study. The study reveals the exclusive IAB list of the most mobile shopping savvy cities in the U.S., with Houston claiming the top spot for the second year in a row. In addition, the report looks at how and where consumers access mobile devices, and how retail apps and digital coupons strongly influence what consumers buy and where they buy.

Most retailers today have developed mobile-optimized websites that perform the same functions as their desktop counterparts. Personally, I like shopping via a mobile browser because it gives me the option to open up multiple tabs to compare prices, styles and whatever else I need to look at before purchasing the perfect pair of pants that may or may not fit. Is a well-designed and functional mobile site enough for retailers, or have stand-alone apps become a necessity in this ever-expanding mobile world?

With the holiday shopping season officially underway, PriceGrabber has released additional results of its second winter holiday shopping survey, revealing where consumers will shop for gifts this year. When asked to select the ways they will shop this season, nearly all respondents indicated that they will do some online shopping from a computer. The number of consumers who plan to visit brick-and-mortar stores dropped by 2 percentage points to 46 percent compared to last year.

Retailers aren't the only ones interested in mobile commerce — cybercriminals are banking on it as well. Cybercriminals are taking the techniques they've honed from online financial transactions and moving them to e-commerce sites. They can steal retail customers’ personal information (e.g., credit cards, gift card data) and put retailers at risk for fraudulent purchases.

Showrooming enabled by the proliferation of smartphones has become the bane of brick-and-mortar retailers. Basically, consumers waltz into a local Best Buy or similar store, find the product they're thinking of buying and check it out. So far so good, from the retailer's perspective. Only then the consumer goes online, sometimes even while standing in the store aisle, to buy it from an e-tailer like Amazon.com. Such behavior is in part responsible for Best Buy's lackluster performance of late. Now retailers are fighting back with their own mobile strategies to best online retailers in this scramble for sales.