Tag: m-commerce

Retailers may not be prepared for the mobile shopping holidays

The holidays are coming and retailers may be unprepared for the proverbial onslaught they will receive from mobile consumers. UniteU, a mobile commerce integrator, has released a new report concerning this problem, suggesting that retailers could face serious challenges when it comes to serving mobile consumers through their websites. The report measures site speeds and their capability to support mobile shopping. UniteU has found that many retailers, including multi-billion-dollar organizations, could fall short of satisfying mobile shoppers during the 2014 holiday season.

Mobile commerce has been performing well during the holiday season

The holidays are an important time for the retail industry. Black Friday is the most active shopping day of the year and serves as an opportunity for retailers to recover from losses they saw earlier in the year. Over the past few years, retailers have been putting a greater focus on mobile commerce, taking note of the growing prominence of mobile shoppers and how much these consumers are spending on products. Several retailers have created mobile websites to accommodate these consumers, but few of these sites are able to serve consumers like they should.

Retailers lack the mobile websites needed to engage consumers effectively

The report shows that many of the retail sites available to consumers are not optimized for mobile devices. This can provide a poor shopping experience for mobile consumers. The majority of mobile payments currently comes from smartphones, which do not use traditional web browsers. Mobile web browsers have trouble deciphering the coding used to make retail websites, so if these sites are not optimized for mobile devices, mobile consumers have trouble using them.

Without optimized mobile websites, retailers could miss out on a significant opportunity

A recent report from Forrester Research suggests that some $26 billion in mobile payments will be processed by the end of this year. The majority of this money is likely to be processed during the holiday season. If retailers cannot optimize their mobile websites by then, they could be missing out on a major opportunity.

The department store has revealed that it is boosting its use of smartphone friendly technology in-store.

Macy’s has revealed that it is keeping up with the times and is making sure that its shopping experience is compatible with the favorite device of most of its customers by enhancing its mobile commerce capabilities in a number of different high tech moves.

For instance, it has expanded its iBeacon mobile marketing messaging capabilities through Shopkick.

This will allow the location based marketing experience to be available throughout the holiday season not only at its flagship shops in New York City and San Francisco, but also to other locations across the United States. This could make it the most large scale retail implementation of iBeacon mobile commerce tech that has been seen so far.

That is only the beginning of its expansion of mobile commerce and shopping capabilities for consumers.

The retailer also announced that it will be bringing in the Image Search image recognition app, which was created within its Idea Lab. That stand alone mobile app has also been incorporated into the Macy’s application. Based on the customer’s images, this software will provide consumers with recommendations for items that can be found either in the store itself, or on their online or m-commerce website.

Moreover, in certain cities, items purchased online or over m-commerce will have same day delivery available. This has become possible through a partnership with a startup called Deliv, and will be available in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, as well as the state of New Jersey.

This is only the latest in several moves that have been made by Macy’s to ensure that it is keeping up with the smartphone and tablet based shopping experience. It also makes the retailer one of the first to have established its range of different mobile commerce capabilities in advance of the 2014 holiday shopping season. Beyond image recognition and iBeacon, it has also announced that Apple Pay transactions will be accepted at both its Macy’s and its Bloomingdales stores, and that beyond same day delivery, in store pickup services will be expanded.