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 report suggests that there has been a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. E-commerce has become a major interest among consumers and commerce, in general, has begun to evolve with the advent of mobile technology. Many people are beginning to use their mobile devices to shop online on a daily basis and this has changed the expectations that consumers have when it comes to the retail sector. Many people now expect retailers to have some significant mobile presence as well as provide mobile-centric services.