Mobile Retailing

Promoting best practices, sharing results and exchanging insights –
as retailers seek to connect with their increasingly mobile customers.

Mobile today is comparable to Internet commerce circa late 1990’s. Increase conversion rates by providing familiar choices:

•    Mobile completed orders
•    Save to Shopping Cart
•    Save to Wish List
•    Click to Call
•    E-mail to self or friend
•    Directions to retail store
Amazon does not offer all of these choices, primarily because Amazon is an online retailer focused on very good prices, but it does offer the two critical options of Save to Wish List and mobile completed order (via a shopping cart.)

a) Customer has a choice of adding to her shopping cart or to her wish list:

Add Product to Shopping Cart

Amazon’s full desktop page is very rich, as is generally the case with most online e-commerce sites. All that functionality simply can’t fit on a mobile page. Choices had to be made to focus only on the key features that mobile users are likely to use.

Amazon Desktop Home Page

A logical set of key mobile tasks include:

1. Search
2. Product Exploration
3. Product Purchase
4. Shopping Cart/Remember/Lists
5. Access Account Information

1. Search

Amazon correctly identified search as the top feature likely to be used by mobile users:
•    Looking up product information - more often than not within the store of one of their competitors. Of course, by pulling in Amazon’s product information, customers can compare the Amazon online price with the retailer price…
o    Customer would want to quickly enter the product name or UPC in a search box
•    Quick access to a product to buy – You friend recommends an item, let’s say a new DVD, which you can buy immediately from Amazon’s mobile site.
o    Similarly search is the primary access to the product.
Amazon clearly does this by placing a search box on almost all pages, thinking through its placement within the page:

iPhone and G1 Amazon Mobile Site

Search is also include throughout the site where it might be needed.

• At the top of the search results page
• At the bottom of a product page - as to not distract users that want to buy the listed product
• On the shopping cart page to encourage users to add additional products
• At the bottom of the customer wish list to encourage adding products

Checkout Page with Search

In addition, search is optimized to make use of guided search

• Ability to search only within one section of the online store
• Ability to see search results by store section in case of many matches

Search Guidance

2. Product Exploration

The mobile phone is also used as a form of exploration and entertainment. While waiting for an appointment you might check some of your favorite retailers for a special or attractive offering, or simply to see what new items are available, or because you are looking for something or a gift for someone.
Amazon’s mobile site makes such product exploration easy – especially on the iPhone with rich navigation widgets.

Home Page Highlights Top Products

Personalized Recommendations

Top Product Lists

3. Product Purchase

And finally, Amazon makes it easy to buy.

Add Product to Shopping Cart

Convenient Checkout

Customer Sign-in Page

4. Shopping Cart / Remember / Lists

A customer is not yet ready to buy on a mobile device? Amazon makes it easy to store her items of interest in her Wish List, which she can access later online. Or conversely, she can store items of interest and check them out in a physical store. In either case, her Amazon lists is always accessible anywhere – anytime.

Wish List

5. Account Information

Finally, a customer may want to check his account anytime and anywhere.

Account Information

Good mobile support requires more than one version of a mobile site to span the diversity of mobile handsets.  At the high end, you want to make full use of the very capable Safari/WebKit browser included on the iPhone, and at the low end, you want to live with the limitations of the Motorola browser that is included in its mass market phones such as the Motorola RAZR.
There are really no substitute to such an approach given the diversity of handsets currently in use – and that diversity will remain for a long time. If you limit yourself to a lowest common denominator site, the more active mobile users on their better devices, like the iPhone will be disappointed – and probably will try to struggle with your full internet site. If you aim higher, then you shut out the very large set of the populations with phones with limited browser capabilities such as the RAZR.

Some have proposed to focus only on the high-end phones. This is tempting; especially as many reports highlight that much of the mobile browsing is done by smartphones and the iPhone in particular. Mobile site development is also easier for these higher-end phones as their browsers have fewer restrictions. But as tempting as that is, you would still turn away the majority of your mobile customers, as feature phone traffic still dominates in aggregate - as the graph below illustrates. In addition, short of support for all handsets, it is hard to market your mobile service – how do you tell your customers which phones you support and which phones you don’t?

US Mobile Web Access by Phone Type - Dec 2008 - Admob

Amazon’s mobile Internet offering consists of two versions: one for the better, higher end browsers such as the iPhone and the Android G1, and one for the rest of the phones.
Two mobile sites is a bare minimum, Unbound Commerce provides four versions: one for the RAZR like devices, one for the capable QVGA handsets being increasingly delivered by handset manufacturers such as the LG Dare, one for larger smart-phones, like the BlackBerries and Windows Mobile devices and one for the iPhone and Android G1 with their very capable browsers and large touch screens. On the iPhones, you can build very rich mobile sites that make use of the unique features of the Safari and Webkit mobile browser – including use of JavaScript, DHTML and Ajax.

Regular Amazon Mobile Site

iPhone and G1 Amazon Mobile Site

Notice that the iPhone version is:

• Better laid out / more rich in graphics
• Uses DHTML widgets for the top books
• Makes better use of the touchscreen UI via button in the header

The same improvement in aesthetics, page layout and features can be seen in almost all screens. Below, I show a product page

Regular Product Detail Page

iPhone Product Detail Page

Continuing on Yesterday’s post, we examine the first best practice - Auto-detecting mobile devices and re-direction to your mobile site.

Mobile users are now more and more taking advantage of the better browsers on their mobile phone, as witnessed by the dramatic growth in mobile web browsing traffic in most geographies including the US. Many retailers, including Amazon, offer mobile specific URL’s using established mobile “standards”, such as:

•    m.amazon.com
•    amazon.mobi

However, most users by habit and convenience, simply type in the name of the .com site in their browser, such as www.amazon.com, or simply amazon.com.

If you want customers to easily find your mobile site, then you want to automatically detect mobile traffic on your main site and present a mobile experience by default– as Amazon does.

Today, odds are, if you are like all the sites we have worked with, you already are receiving mobile traffic. But with no mobile support, and no automatic mobile device detection, you’re effectively displaying a ‘Closed for Business’ sign and potentially driving your customers to competitors.

Closed Store

Auto detection of mobile device also helps you simplify your online efforts. You continue to use your existing URL’s in all your marketing efforts. The same URL can be used online, in e-mails, in print, or with 3rd party sites like affiliate sites and search engines.

For comparison, here is Amazon’s familiar desktop site - won’t fit on most phones…

Amazon Desktop Site

…but Amazon’s mobile site will.

Amazon Mobile Site

For the  customers that would prefer to see your regular wired Internet site, it is customary to add a link at the bottom of you mobile page. Amazon does so with a simple ‘Amazon PC Site’ link at the bottom of the mobile site Home Page:

Desktop Site Link

To summarize:

•    Redirect your mobile traffic hitting your regular site automatically.
•    Provision the existing standard  mobile URL’s to point to the same site:
o    m.<your_webiste>.com
o    <you_website>.mobi
o    wap.<your_website>.com
o    <your_website>.com/mobile
•    Market and promote a single URL

You are now open for business:

Open Store

Many of our retailer customers have asked us for mobile web site best practices. We decided to use Amazon, a leader in the space, to illustrate what we consider are the top m-commerce best practices.

Amazon does not need any introduction. Amazon is the No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, with net sales increasing 18% in the fourth quarter to $6.70 billion from $5.67 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. For all of 2008, Amazon says net sales were $19.17 billion, a 29% increase from $14.84 billion last year.

Amazon is always looking for new and better ways to sell even more merchandize to customers. According to Amazon “We are going to make sure that we focus on the customer experience”.

So it should not be a surprise that Amazon is one of the earliest and most prominent adopter of mobile technology in the U.S. Amazon has adopted many of the best mobile practices we consider are important:
1.    Auto Detect mobile devices and re-direct
2.    Optimized pages and widgets for all popular handsets
3.    Optimized user flows for key selected tasks
4.    Customer options for placing orders
5.    Merchandizing each step of the way
6.    Seamless integration between mobile and desktop sites
7.    Take mobile device security into consideration
8.    Complementary SMS programs
9.    Mobile Client Strategy

Over the next few days we will review each of these in detail. Let us know if you agree on this list.
– Gerald Hewes

We’re pretty excited about the opportunities out there for retailers who accept the challenge of increasingly mobile consumers. More than “just” a new channel, mobile fills in the gaps during all those times that your customers are NOT in your store and NOT in front of their computer. Mobile is where the physical world of stores, print ads and billboards meets the online world of instant ordering, product details and customer reviews. Anytime-anywhere.

But what are the best practices for this emerging world of Mobile Retailing? Hard to say, because it’s so new. Which is why we established this blog, as a way to share good practices, results and insights with others who want to push the envelope, all the while keeping a focus on achieving significant business results.

Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be exploring some challenging topics, such as:
- What data is out there to support a mobile initiative for retailers?
- Will customers really make purchases from their mobile phones?
- What makes mobile unique?
- What use cases make the most sense for a mobile web site?

Your contributions are welcomed, as are your questions, and suggestions of what topics need further exploration and research.

— Keith Lietzke