Mobile Trends for Holiday
2 Min Read
With the holiday season coming up, we’re starting to see a good bit of anxiety from brands and retailers…especially now that customers expect you to have high functioning multichannel commerce. Remember the days when making a purchase meant browsing around a mall full of stores until you found the perfect product? It seems like those days aren’t quite over yet. But then again, neither are the days of one-stop online shopping. Customers now want opportunity for commerce anywhere they are. What’s different might simply be their preference for what products and when.
Retailers are Staying In-Store
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal, shows that retailers haven’t been vacating their shopping mall real estate at quite the same rate they used to. The article suggests that that might be because customers’ are unwilling (or simply can’t) buy certain products online and also because malls are strategically stocking up on ecommerce-averse shops as a result. Instead of rows and rows of apparel stores and electronics shops, mall goers might start to see more brick-and-mortar friendly fitness centers or restaurants. In other words, it is by no means dying, but the face of physical commerce does seem to be changing.
More Mobile for Holiday Shopping?
It’ll be interesting to see how the slight downtick in mall vacancies affects our omni-channel commerce clients, especially as they head into the holiday season. Comscore reports show that while online sales on Black Friday increased 26% last year, in-store Black Friday sales actually declined 2%. And while that might seem like bad news for physical stores of multi-channel retailers, the vacancies downtick suggests that they’ve something up their sleeve to compete with online sales.
One way is to merchandise with customers’ preferred purchase location in mind (i.e. sell products in-store that can’t be sold online, or that customers are unwilling to buy online). Another way is to leverage mobile, especially on traditionally big in-store shopping days. 84% of smart phone shoppers use their devices as in-store companions. One in three shoppers turn to their phones instead of asking an employee. Furthermore, the three biggest days for mobile queries were Black Friday, Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas. Retailers definitely want to use mobile to enhance customers’ in-store experience and give them extra incentive to buy in-store.
In short, ecommerce technology isn’t tearing customers away from traditional shopping outlets like malls and physical stores. It’s completely changing the way they shop (and consequently, should change the way merchants sell). Moving forward, retailers can’t limit themselves to a strictly virtual or a strictly in-store presence, or they risk limiting their visibility with a population that wants opportunities for commerce, everywhere they are.
Photo via screenmediadaily.com
Ron Bongo is CEO at Corra. Ron manages Corra's corporate strategy, directs its management team, and builds key business and strategic relationships for the company. In 2012, he drove the company into open source software, helping clients implement web content management and ecommerce systems.
Corra, a Publicis Sapient company, is the global commerce leader and SI helping brands and organizations grow by evaluating, building, and optimizing their digital commerce ecosystems. Our vast experience with composable and headless implementations speeds time-to-value and provides technical freedom to our clients. Our TotalCare managed services program provides gold-standard support, enhancements and ongoing commerce strategy. We are strategic thinkers, accomplished engineers, and award-winning experience designers. We believe outstanding customer experiences can’t exist without flawless technology, and that flawless technology is pointless without beautiful, human-centered design. Our clients are an integral part of our team. Together, we remove the obstacles that are limiting growth and discover new opportunities. We don’t rest until our clients achieve their full potential. Our clients’ KPIs are our KPIs. We have 20 years of experience in commerce technology, but we also know that customer expectations are constantly evolving. For this reason, we’ve built future-proof solutions and refined an agile execution process that helps our clients achieve more with less. As a Publicis Sapient company, Corra joins a global network spanning 20,000 people with 53 offices around the world enabling us to accelerate our clients’ businesses through designing and building the experiences and services their customers demand.
