Retailers who once envisioned a vast new market of mobile shoppers eagerly hitting “buy” on their cellphones have run headlong into a harsh reality: their customers are all thumbs.
Even as phones get more sophisticated, many retailers’ mobile sites and apps make it difficult to shop. It can be hard to examine items on a small screen, and the pages are often slow to load. Perhaps most frustrating, the process of entering information on a mobile keyboard requires either surgical precision or very tiny fingers. As a result, retailers report that only about 2 per cent of their sales are coming from mobile devices, a number well below the expectations of many e-commerce analysts.
“Everyone was so excited last year, but then sales through mobile haven’t been growing as rapidly as we would have thought,” said Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research, which tracks the technology industry. “Many retailers haven’t even optimised their sites for mobile, and who wants to spend their time pinching screens and mistyping links?”
The potential for added revenue from mobile sales remains huge, retailers believe. Ebay said that in 2010 it generated almost $2 billion in mobile sales, and is on track to double that this year.
But major retailers like Bed Bath and Beyond, Coach, Dillard’s and Ann Taylor still do not have sites designed specifically for mobile phones — known as optimised sites — nor do they have apps. By mid-2010, according to the Acquity Group, just 12 per cent of the top 500 US online retailers had sites compatible with mobile browsers, while just 7 per cent had apps.
Now retailers are realising they no longer have a choice, because customers expect to shop on their phones and want the experience to be as good or better than on a computer. That is what 85 per cent of online shoppers told Tealeaf, a software company that monitors buyers’ online behaviour. So e-commerce companies are racing to figure out the best way to accommodate tiny screens and big fingers so they don’t miss out on the mobile sales.
The tepid response to mobile shopping has retailers pursuing a variety of improvements to compensate for a phone’s limitations, with things like voice search, one-touch checkout and simplified mobile sites.
Alibris, a book seller, introduced a mobile site late last year. “When you transform a giant PC screen onto a little device, you have to decide what not to bring along,” said Jeanie Bunker, general manager of Alibris Retail. “So we stripped out all the things we thought were not relevant to the mobile user.”
Many retailers point to Amazon’s apps as worthy models. Unlike most retailers, Amazon started developing mobile websites in 2006. To minimise typing, Amazon offers bar code scanning, voice search and automatic fill-in on typed searches. Type “Har,” for instance, and it displays Harry Potter books.
Another benefit of Amazon’s app: most of its customers are existing online customers, and once they sign on to the mobile app, they don’t need to re-enter billing and shipping information.
That kind of convenience is crucial to a mobile site’s appeal, because getting customers through checkout quickly is a major challenge.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
