Editor's Note: This article was originally published by Keynote Systems, a mobile communications and Internet testing firm, for its proprietary newsletters. It is republished here in a slightly modified form, with permission. Mobile web access is expanding rapidly, and this article should demonstrate to developers some of this issues involved with mobile-optimized ecommerce sites.
The mobile shopping market is small—if you consider $750 million small. Although it is only 1 percent of online sales, mobile is where the action is for online retailers today. USA Today notes that well-known retailers are employing various mobile tactics to enhance the shopping experience. Whether it’s making a purchase, comparing prices and features, downloading a coupon, or sending a picture of an item to a special loved-one, mobile is becoming an integral part of what consumers have come to expect. As mobile changes the landscape for retail, other B2C enterprises should quickly learn the lessons of retail and adapt them for their own industry and needs.
Innovation in Action
The number of online shoppers that are no longer content to do their comparison shopping at home tethered to a PC is rising. They want to use their mobile phones to find deals on the run, or even comparison shop while standing it the aisle at Macy’s or Target. Big names in retail recognize this trend and are creatively harnessing the power of mobile this holiday season.
- JC Penney launched a holiday-themed mobile site that lets customers browse gift items, find a store and even request a wake-up call on key shopping days to take advantage of Penney’s sales. Customers can also opt-in for future mobile alerts from the company and send “hints” about their own gift preferences (at Penney’s) to family and friends.
- Crate and Barrel is delivering coupons exclusively to their customers who also have access to the Yowza iPhone application.
- Handbag and accessories retailer Dooney & Bourke launched a new mobile site that allows users to browse and purchase from any web-enabled mobile device.
What does this mean for you? As the habits of online shoppers change, they foretell changes in other mobile markets as well. Mobile is a 24x7 online phenomenon and people are more likely to forget their wallets than their mobile devices when on the move. They want to shop, bank, check for weather and news updates or just about anything else whenever and wherever they please. If you want to reach these consumers, you want to make sure your content and applications are available and performing well.
Whatever your business—whether online, brick & mortar, or both—it’s time to consider developing a mobile strategy in the coming year. A year ago, 60 percent of the people in the world owned mobile phones and roughly 5 percent of all online traffic originated from mobile devices. This year, over 40 million smartphones were sold in the 3Q2009 alone. Mobile’s percentage of online traffic is destined to rise.
Copying best practices is an easy first step in developing a mobile strategy, but the next step, executing it properly, is a challenge that is much more difficult than you’d think. Most importantly, getting it right increases customer satisfaction and reduces calls to customer care—getting it wrong does the opposite.
How Much Does Poor Performance Cost?
Everyone who moves to mobile quickly becomes aware of the technical challenges. Screens are smaller. Latency is higher. And just because performance is great on one carrier in San Francisco doesn’t mean that it’s the same on another carrier in the same city—or even the same carrier in New York.
Until recently, retailers that embraced mobile had to scale down their “heavy” Web sites to accommodate the slow download on common mobile devices. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) allowed them to create simple sites capable of delivering simple content to the masses. In the early days of mobile, few retailers felt a substantial revenue impact when the service went down; consequently far too little attention was paid to performance.
The smartphone has changed the equation. Whether it’s with a customizable downloadable app or on a rich, optimized HTML site, consumers are using their mobile devices to reach out to retailers and their expectations are high. The financial consequences of slow performance or lack of availability are now significant. Poor performance leads to abandonment.
Historically speaking, the popular retail application in mobile has been SMS. It’s a relatively simple concept: set up a Common Short Code and deliver promotional messages to users who’ve opted-in. As retailers have been able to see the revenue-generating impact of implementing a successful Common Short Code, they’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of maintaining healthy performance standards.
Today, retailers know that there’s a strong and quantifiable correlation between a successful SMS campaign and revenue. This connection will only become stronger in the years to come. Real money is being exchanged over SMS, which has become the backbone for mobile payments. And it’s not just SMS—companies such as JC Penney and Starbucks are beginning to use downloadable apps for coupons and as virtual gift cards as well. As mobile becomes an increasingly important part of the retail experience, the performance levels for mobile applications and services become key metrics for retailers and enterprises alike. When they aren’t at peak performance, business isn’t either.
Keeping Your Doors Open
As shoppers grow to depend on mobile, the financial impact of slow or unavailable content and applications becomes ever clearer. If retail customers can’t get what they want in a reasonable amount of time, they are likely to abandon the content or service. And once they’re gone, don’t expect them to come back.
It’s probably not realistic to think that mobile applications, content, and services will be available for rapid download 100 percent of the time. But if you’re currently available 96 percent of the time and can close the gap to 98 percent—it’s like being open for business 7 additional days per year. The best way to ensure that your customers can access your mobile applications and services to get what they need is rather straightforward. Find problems before your customers do and fix them before they find out. The first step in improving mean-time-to-repair is continual monitoring.
You want an efficient, automated solution with the ability to receive customized alarms when performance thresholds are not met—from slowdowns to absolute site failure. In addition, you want your monitoring solution to display results in a collaborative environment for rapid debugging of failures and to facilitate root cause analysis. Finally, monitoring should be done outside of your systems’ firewalls to get the most accurate performance measurement—that of an end user.
