In m-commerce design, simplicity, speed, and consideration for the customer are keys to success
By Elizabeth Gardner
Ringtones, absolutely. Songs, sure. Maybe even the latest episode of Heroes. But using a cell phone to buy actual stuff—a book, a bouquet, a DVD—remains for the most part a painful experience, like Internet shopping circa 1994, with pioneer browser Mosaic on a dial-up connection. It’s the same erratic performance, the same scanty selection of shops, the same annoying wait to download and upload.
Back then, a casual shopper could be forgiven for thinking that this Internet thing would never go anywhere. But look what happened.
Now’s the time
Now’s the time that retailers should be experimenting with mobile commerce—now, when relatively few of their customers are thinking about the phone as a shopping device, when they can try a basic m-commerce site with minimal outlay, when they can make their mistakes before it gets too costly and when the number of customers they will alienate is small. Remember when a web site ceased to be a novelty and customers started to be irked not to find their faves online? That same shift in m-commerce will come in the next few years in the U.S., and has already started to happen overseas.
“If retailers want to be ready when the market is ready, they have to start now,” says Norman Sadeh, director of the mobile commerce lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Networks are getting faster, phones are getting smarter, and more users are accessing the Internet through their phones. “A mobile site may not be a major source of revenue now, but they can’t afford not to enter,” he says.
And the debut of the iPhone—even though its market share is small and select—will only accelerate the trend by inducing users to “think different” about what a phone can do. “It raises the bar, and that’s welcome from the consumer’s standpoint,” Sadeh says. The iPhone lets users surf the actual web. While it takes good eyes to read a web page on an iPhone, the technology lets users zoom in on relevant portions of the page.
Jason Taylor, vice president of mobile products for site developer Usablenet, New York, says the iPhone has caused a rush of interest in mobile sites from businesses that haven’t tried the territory before.
Sexy sites
“The iPhone has made mobile sites sexy,” he says. The company optimizes for iPhone, adapting web pages to its size and bandwidth limitations, but it’s still a richer experience than on a standard cell phone. Usablenet recently entered the retail arena with an m-commerce site for 1-800-Flowers, but it numbers several major airlines and hotel chains among its mobile clients.
Mobile sites for the average cell phone should be like haiku, distilling a big retail web site down to its essence. With screens the size of a large commemorative stamp, browser software from at least seven possible carriers, and handset controls that have literally hundreds of small variations depending on manufacturer and model, cell phones are a web developer’s nightmare. Stripping things down is the first step. A logo is fine, but striving to reproduce the whole branding environment of the web is futile from a design standpoint and probably unwelcome to the customer.
“We launched our mobile site to answer the question, ‘How do we help our customers with the need-it-now, ASAP mindset?’” says Vibhav Prasad, senior director of web merchandising at 1-800-Flowers, whose mobile site debuted earlier this year in time for Mother’s Day. “How do you present what’s really important to your customers? They don’t have a lot of real estate on their screen, and not a lot of patience, given the speed at which mobile customers access the web.”
The company’s answer was to focus on the thing their customers are most likely to want to do on the run: order flowers or other gifts for same-day delivery. The first menu choice on the mobile site links to the items available for delivery that day. The other choices are for the company’s top three occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, and get well.
The full web site allows customers to place multiple orders for multiple recipients at the same time. The mobile site doesn’t, because most phone users aren’t interested in doing anything that complicated. However, it does leverage all the information available in an existing customer’s account, to keep keying to an absolute minimum. It takes maybe half-a-dozen clicks from opening screen to completed order.
Saving the sale
GourmetStation, an Atlanta-based delivery service for gourmet meals, launched a mobile effort a few months back because its vendor, Seattle-based mPoria, made a strong case, says founder Donna Lynes-Miller. “I asked mPoria why now, and they said first, because your competitors are going to do it eventually, and second because it’s another way to get your products to your existing customers.”
She concedes that the mobile site is plain to the point of ugliness—just a small logo and a list of ten options—but it offers most of the company’s 200 or so products, mostly three- or four-course dinners delivered overnight or scheduled for a specific occasion. She’d like to get some images associated with the listings, but has to balance their selling power with the time it takes to load them. Since most of GourmetStation’s mobile customers have previously ordered through the web site, they’re familiar with the product and have less need to see before they buy.
After three months, the mobile site accounts for less than 1% of GourmetStation’s sales, but Lynes-Miller is still glad to have joined the mobile game. “Gift giving is our core business and delivering on the right date is as important as the product itself,” she says. “I want to have the mobile option so our customers can order even if they’re traveling.”
Once the basic site is established, it’s time to think about the unique capabilities of combining the mobile web, text messaging, and the information stored in the phone itself.
Usablenet’s Jason Taylor suggests this sample scenario: Special limited-edition sneakers are set to go on sale Friday at 11 pm, but the retailer isn’t taking pre-orders because that would dilute the hype. Only losers are at their computers at that hour, so the retailer offers mobile users the option of signing up for a text reminder the moment the shoes are available to order. The text message links customers to the ordering page, which their phones can instantly populate with shipping and billing information. The customers submit their orders and are back at their respective parties by 11:05.
Embracing the m-lifestyle
Vibhav Prasad of 1-800-Flowers envisions a customer ordering roses to arrive in his wife’s hands by the time he gets home, and then receiving a text message confirming delivery. He’s also considering the possibility of offering “virtual gifts,” similar to those available in the Second Life virtual world, that could potentially become a fad among the 18- to-30-year-olds who represent the sweet spot for mobile marketing.
Nikki Baird, managing partner for Retail Systems Research, Miami, can envision a cross-platform function where shoppers enter their shopping list at home, then access it at the grocery store through their phone, perhaps automatically receiving coupons for certain purchases with barcodes that the cashier can scan right off the phone. Other kinds of linking could help make consumers turn regularly to mobile-enabled shopping. “Retailers could do a lot to save the sale by having product availability on their mobile service, so that people could enter a ZIP code and see if something was available nearby,” Baird says. “That alone would be of huge value to the consumer.”
Elizabeth Gardner is a Riverside, Ill.-based freelance business writer.
Where to start
There are several ways to get a mobile e-commerce site up and running, says Dave Sikora, CEO of 30 Second Software, the company behind the Digby shopping service for Blackberry users.
One option is for mobile web users to turn to a “transcoding engine” which automatically delivers a stripped down version of any URL they type in. Both Google and AOL transcode the sites delivered to cell phone users through their mobile search services. That leaves retailers at the mercy of the transcoding engines, which might make their site ugly at best and unreadable at worst. Merchants can do that transformation themselves and market the resulting “baby Internet site” to mobile users, Sikora says, but it may take intervention by a professional design team to produce something usable.
Another option is to do a complete lightweight redesign from scratch. “Your web site is dynamic, so you’ll need a whole new team,” not only to do the design but to keep it up to date, Sikora says. “In both cases (transcoding and redesigning), the user experience is not necessarily one that would encourage people to come back. Our experience shows that if you can’t deliver a good user experience, people won’t use it at all.”
One way to get mobile with a minimum of fuss—and the way that Sikora not surprisingly advocates—is to farm out the job. A mobile site developer can take a merchant’s logo, categories and product list (via the same type of data feed used for comparison shopping sites) and put together a site in anywhere from hours to weeks, depending on the vendor and the complexity of the site. Pricing and business models vary wildly depending on the target market and the specific offering. Here are just three:
MPoria, Seattle: For merchants wishing to experiment, mPoria will put up a basic storefront and offer products through its mobile mall for a set-up fee of $99 and a monthly fee of up to $150. Custom solutions are also available for larger retailers who want integration with their back-end systems. MPoria has more than 70 clients, including Buy.com and GourmetStation.
Usablenet, New York: Provides mobile sites for Marriott, Delta Airlines, U.S. Airways and 1-800-Flowers, among others. Depending on size and complexity, costs range from $50,000 to $100,000 for design, implementation, and first year of management.
30 Second Software, Austin, Texas: Primary offering is the Digby service, which offers products from Godiva, Vermont Teddy Bear, FTD.com and others, in an application that users download to their phones. Currently limited to Blackberries, though the company is contemplating expansion to other handsets. Operates on a revenue-sharing model. Will soon introduce a fee-based service to set up mobile storefronts.
Shopping the iPhone—a test drive
One hot iPhone selling point is that it allows users to browse normal web sites—no mobile accommodation required. If all phones were iPhones, would a retailer even need a separate m-commerce site? Nikki Baird, managing partner at Retail Systems Research, volunteered to shop for a rain jacket on her husband’s shiny new iPhone, just to see.
The iPhone uses AT&T’s mobile data service, though it also has the ability to connect to a wi-fi network. Baird used wi-fi for half her shopping trip and the AT&T service for the other half.
Overall, Baird describes her iPhone shopping trip as OK—not as fast as on a computer, but not as bad as she expected. “Browsing was painful and pictures were a little slow to load,” she says. “But the iPhone lets you open multiple browsing windows, so it’s a lot like using tabs.”
As many online shoppers do, she started at Google, searching for “women’s rain jacket.” One of the top results was Nextag.com, a comparison shopping site. Drawing from the Nextag results, she settled on a jacket from BackCountryOutlet.com. Ironically, the only page that didn’t display correctly was the one that contained the “Buy Now” button. It was missing, and Baird had to guess where it might have been and click that spot. Fortunately, she guessed right, and it took her to the ordering page. “Filling in my address and credit card info was a breeze,” she says. “It took far less time to buy it than it did to find it.” The whole expedition lasted about 25 minutes from the opening search to the order confirmation.
If everyone had an iPhone, would m-commerce, as such, become obsolete? Could merchants rely only on their regular web sites to draw mobile business? Probably not, Baird says. The phone shopping experience is still unwieldy and best suited to emergencies, and mobile phone users will always appreciate speed.
“I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface for how phones will be used in shopping, and when we do, we’ll find there are things that don’t make sense to have on the home page of your e-commerce site,” Baird says. “Instead, you’ll have a link that says, ‘Click here to access mobile features,’ so that the user ends up on a page with ‘Quick product search’ or ‘Shopping list’ or ‘Locate a store.’”
