Enhancing Retail Ecommerce with Mobile #ecomchat – Key Points

This week’s #ecomchat was on Enhancing Retail Ecommerce with Mobile – looking at how customers want to interact with companies via mobile devices and what tech you should have in place to enable this. As mobile growth is impacting how retailers evolve their ecommerce channel, it’s an important subject for Client and Agency teams alike.

The chat was based around 3 key question as usual and below is a summary of the key points and discussion threads.

Question 1 – What are the big trends in how people use mobile devices to interact with brands?

• @poakley discussed the interesting data on the times of use for different devices. Most tablet shopping occurs in the evenings when people are at home, 7pm onwards, whereas smartphones are used more during commuter hours. @jamesgurd recommends checking your analytics data to see how closely your customers follow these trends.
• @danbarker asked how retailers can use this information? One option is to know when to share information based on the shopping behaviour on different devices e.g. push notifications in apps at relevant times of day.
• There is a general trend for companies to display the desktop site to tablet users rather than try to fit the mobile site to tablet resolution. @schilbach commented that if he’s given a mobile site when browsing on the iPad he looks for the option to switch to desktop site.
• @danbarker also raised the point that Google seem to be defining tablet as non-mobile at the moment.

Question 2 – What are the in-store opportunities for multi-channel brands like John Lewis? And for smaller brands?

• Inevitably the wonder of QR codes was discussed by quite a few people. @ahmed_khalifa observed that QR codes are a good low cost solution for smaller retailers but the challenge is to give people reason to scan them.
• A few people suggested that retailers should tap into marketing opportunities to shoppers in-store – apps is a popular route for this.
• @danbarker raised the subject of in-store WiFi which is something many of the large retailers and department stores are investing in. @SEMantiks has been emailed promotional details on signing in to free WiFi – so some brands are looking to promote this as a benefit.
• @maxray raised an important point – retailers shouldn’t lose track of the personal experience in order to pursue mobile solutions e.g. face-to-face interaction is still really important and can help convert customers better digital solutions.
• @brandbillie discussed the potential to use QR codes on clothes labels to bring products to life – can cross and up-sell, display rich content.
• @craigwsoftcat advised not to forget the potential for using plain old SMS as a footfall driver. In fact, it’s interesting to see how many native apps include email sign-up but not SMS sign-up – very odd! Apparently 97% are opened immediately.
• @optimiseordie recommended giving customers a unique WiFi code so you can track them individually – enable this across all stores, then track how each person shops. Great potential for personalization.

Thanks again to everyone for joining in, we hope to see you next week.