When It Comes to Mobile Shopping, Businesses Fall Short of Customers’ Expectations

By Rieva Lesonsky

It’s no secret that mobile shopping is hot, hot, hot. In fact, eMarketer estimates there will be 72.8 million mobile shoppers in the U.S. this year, of whom 94.3 percent will use a smartphone to research products and browse the Web. More than half (53 percent) of those users will make purchases on their phones, pushing m-commerce (mobile commerce) sales to $11.6 billion overall for 2012.

M-commerce is still a small part of the retail pie, but it’s growing in importance. Unfortunately, though more users are turning to smartphones to access retail brands, they’re often disappointed in the functionality they find from retailers’ mobile offerings.

December 2011 research by L2 Think Tank cited by eMarketer surveyed beauty/skincare, fashion, hospitality, retail and watch/jewelry brands about their activities online and found that, when it comes to mobile, these companies are falling far short of what customers expect.

The most popular feature for retailers to offer on their mobile sites was ecommerce capability (67 percent) and store locator features (67 percent). When it came to other tools that users might expect to find on retailers’ mobile sites, however, the numbers declined significantly.

Just 44 percent offered mobile product search—which could be a key competitive feature when consumers are out and about looking for a particular product. And only 23 percent of companies had video on their mobile sites, compared to 82 percent who offered video on their regular websites.

Retailers aren’t doing much better when it comes to mobile optimization of email. Although 78 percent of the companies surveyed were using email marketing, the majority (53 percent) sent emails with links to their standard website, which might not be mobile-friendly. Only 24 percent sent users an email message that was optimized for mobile viewing, and even fewer used mobile-friendly links (such as links to mobile apps or mobile-optimized websites).

Although eMarketer doesn’t specify, I’m assuming this survey focused on big-name retail brands. If even these companies aren’t yet taking advantage of the mobile market, the situation for small businesses is probably even worse. But that doesn’t give you an excuse. In fact, it should spark your competitive energies. If big companies are ignoring the mobile niche, you’ve got a chance to gain ground. So if you’re not taking steps to capture these customers, what are you waiting for?

Image by Flickr user rayand (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Branding, Email Marketing, Marketing, sales process, Small Business, small business, Technology, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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