With m-commerce, mobile phone users can shop online wherever they may be
By Bill Siwicki
A commuter is sitting on a train reading a story in the newspaper on horror writer Stephen King. A passage in the story highlights King’s most recent novel, “Duma Key.” The commuter is wowed by the description of the supernatural thriller and decides it’s a must-read.
She’s ready to buy and is undeterred by the lack of a bookstore on the train or a PC or laptop to connect to a web store. Like 174 million other Americans, she has a mobile phone capable of browsing the web. So she whips it out, selects her Amazon.com bookmark, types “Duma Key” into the search window, selects “Duma Key” in the search results, and, because she has an account with Amazon.com and previously downloaded a cookie with her sign-in information, clicks on Buy Now with 1-Click. Done. And in less than 60 seconds.
“Putting a mobile site out there allows customers at the moment of impulse to interact with Amazon whenever they want,” says Sam Hall, director of wireless products at Amazon.com Inc.
What’s more...
Had she wanted to, the commuter could have viewed product details and customer reviews. She could have added the book to her shopping cart to purchase later, or added it to her Amazon Wish List. Or she could have taken advantage of a money-saving Amazon.com cross-sell and purchased “Duma Key” and another King tome, “Blaze.”
Dubbed Amazon Anywhere, the Amazon.com mobile site was created in house and launched in 2001, greatly predating today’s growing number of mobile commerce sites. It requires no special URL; Amazon.com servers automatically recognize the identifying code from a mobile web browser and mobile phone and display the version of the site that fits the phone, whether a standard mobile phone, a smartphone or a phone such as the iPhone capable of browsing standard web pages.
The 2001 version of the site was bare bones compared with today’s Amazon Anywhere, which the company reports has realized a significant increase in traffic in the last year. Over the years the e-retailer has added features and functions based on customer e-mails and comments that came in through Feedback buttons.
“People that use mobile are very passionate about it and have no problem letting us know what they like and don’t like,” Hall says.
Growth in the use of the mobile web is increasing rapidly, he adds, and the mobile realm is shaping up. “The devices have gotten a lot better, so have the networks, customers are more used to using their phone for more than just talking—all these things have come together to make the mobile environment really good,” Hall says.
The mobile web, broadly put, is web browsing on a handheld device. But there are two types of sites mobile device users can visit: a standard site, which can be rendered as the designers intended by only a tiny fraction of phones today, and a mobile-optimized site, one specially created for viewing on mobile devices. Mobile optimized sites, like Amazon Anywhere, are pared-down versions of their big brothers designed to provide content and functions simply and quickly.
“The mobile channel is ready now. In 1995, when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, retailers faced the same questions: Is this new channel for real? Can it be used as a competitive weapon?” says Steve Slezak, marketing director at Digby, an m-commerce mall launched in January 2007 that includes retailers FTD Flowers, Godiva Chocolatier, Vermont Teddy Bear and Capalbo’s Giftbaskets. “Retailers who wait on the sidelines of the mobile web will find themselves playing catch-up in a channel that is poised for explosive growth. Retailers must start thinking now about mobility. Even if they do not, their competitors will.”
Waiting is the operative word. Retailers need do nothing for mobile devices such as the iPhone that can render standard web sites as they are intended to be rendered. (Many smartphones can render standard web sites, but they do so in a way that slices and dices them to fit their smaller screens.) The question is: Create a mobile-optimized site or not?
“No matter what you do with a phone, it has limited screen real estate. And the keyboard can be cumbersome from a data entry standpoint. You cannot take a big web page and shrink it down to just become smaller, it must be optimized to be a better experience for a smaller screen,” says Dilip Venkatachari, product management director, Google mobile, at Google Inc., which launched its mobile site in 2000. “The consumer propensity to transact via the mobile phone is growing tremendously. It is a very good time for retailers to look at mobile and understand what mobile-optimized sites can do to maximize brand awareness and sales.”
Still, even though the overwhelmingly vast majority of mobile devices today can access only mobile-optimized sites, some experts think creating these sites may only be a short-term solution.
“The iPhone has set the bar for a true mobile browsing experience where sites render the way they would on a PC. This is the way the mobile web is going to go,” says Cindy Krum, mobile marketing specialist at Blue Moon Works Inc., a mobile marketing consulting and technology company. “People who really want the mobile web will buy the phones capable of browsing full web pages.”
Capable phones
Regardless of the size of their phones’ screens, odds are mobile phone users have the ability to access the Internet with their devices. 243 million citizens, or 80% of the U.S. population of 303.6 million, have mobile phones, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association. Of mobile phone users, 174 million, or 72%, have phones capable of browsing the web.
Thus, 57% of the entire U.S. population use phones that can browse the Internet (individuals must sign up for wireless data service through their telecommunications providers to do so). Of U.S. citizens with mobile phones, 25%, or 60.8 million, browse the Internet from their phones; 16%, or 38.9 million, do so frequently, according to JupiterResearch LLC.
Marketers are already responding to this massive, if largely untapped, base of Internet phone users. 40% of U.S. companies with annual revenue of $50 million or more offer mobile web sites, and an additional 22% plan to do so in the next 12 months, according to “Mobile Web Sites: Designing for Mobility,” a new report from JupiterResearch.
The number of mobile web sites—which today focus on consumer experience first and monetization second—is growing because mobile phones are becoming more powerful, mobile web browsers are better than ever, and wireless networks are transmitting data much faster, says Julie Ask, vice president and research director at JupiterResearch and lead author of the report.
“As mobile phones and the mobile web experience improve, more consumers are using the mobile web,” Ask says. “Now consumer expectations go up: They have some good experiences with mobile sites and soon they are expecting standard web sites of other companies to offer a mobile experience.”
Thinking small
Technical construction of a mobile-optimized site is essentially the same as that for standard web sites only with different languages and applications. These include XHTML Basic, wireless application protocol (commonly known as WAP), Windows Mobile .Net, Java Micro Edition, Apple software development toolkit, Google Android, Brew and others. Retailers can create mobile sites in house or turn to a vendor such as mPoria Inc. or Usablenet Inc. that specializes in mobile site building.
Mobile sites can be freestanding with their own URLs, which typically include “mobile” or “WAP” or “m” or use a mobile-oriented domain such as .mobi. Or they can be launched automatically from the URL of the standard web site, which auto-detects through code sent by mobile phones and mobile browsers that a request is coming from a handheld device and redirects that request from the standard site to the mobile site.
The challenge in creating a mobile site, most experts say, is learning how to think small: deciding what content, features and functions to include and exclude, and how to display what is included.
“The mobile web is not the web. Understanding this is key,” Digby’s Slezak says. “The decade of experience we have cultivated on how to sell on the web cannot be ported straight to the mobile world. Retailers need to think through their mobile strategy from the ground up.”
While Amazon.com offers much of the same product information—basic information, product imagery, customer reviews and more—on its mobile site, it whittled away some features and functions but included a system to speed the purchasing process.
“How do I create a great customer experience while avoiding putting the entire web site experience on a small screen? The last thing you want to do is put something out there that is frustrating because people will give up and drop off,” Amazon.com’s Hall says.
One example of a feature dropped for the mobile site is streaming audio clips featured on CD product pages on the standard site. “We don’t believe the average customer on the mobile web wants this, and we would not be able to put a good customer experience behind it,” Hall explains.
An example of a standard site function the e-retailer believed was absolutely crucial to the mobile site is 1-click buying. “If a customer does not have a Qwerty keyboard, entering information on a nine-key phone becomes rather tedious,” Hall says. “It is really important to have 1-click buying because it eliminates text-heavy input.”
Significantly streamlined
When another e-retailer wrapped its hands around small, it decided to strip down its standard web site to create a mobile experience that gets right to the heart of the matter. Netflix Inc. launched its mobile site—Netflix.com/mobile, built in house in a few weeks by a couple of engineers as a pet project—in summer 2006. It concluded subscribers on the go generally would be looking to search for a movie, read a bit about it and add it to their queue, or review what’s already in their queue.
“The key was keeping it wonderfully simple,” says Gibson Biddle, vice president of product management at Netflix. “Our regular site has a more personalized experience with recommendations and such based on your member history. We chose not to do all these things on our mobile site. Basically, when you are out with friends and family and someone suggests a title to you, you can Netflix it.”
To simplify the mobile experience, the Netflix site asks for a user’s name and password only once, storing that information in a mobile cookie so the subscriber never has to enter the information again. And the merchant dropped its recommendations, search by genre, community offerings, and other features and functions to speed download times and sharpen the focus on searching for films and adding them to a queue. It even dropped movies’ average ratings, which only appear as a small cluster of highlighted stars on the standard site.
“Dropping that made the data transfer faster and made each screen of information as light and clear as possible,” Biddle says. “Given the small screen real estate of standard phones, we were very careful not to bring all the features from the site. The No. 1 error in mobile site design is doing too much.”
A blooming site
1-800-Flowers.com was on the same wavelength as Netflix when it launched its mobile site last April. Accessed at the same URL as the standard site, which auto-detects mobile devices and redirects to the mobile version, the retailer’s mobile site is designed to get customers in and out as quickly as possible. The first of seven options on the home page, for example, is one of the most common purchases: Order 1 dozen Red Roses. And emphasis is placed on the same-day-delivery offerings for shoppers on the go who suddenly realize they have forgotten, say, a wedding anniversary.
“We have seen a lot of interest and adoption from customers. And we have seen a big increase in the number of orders,” says Vibhav Prasad, senior director of web site marketing. “Mobile is a consistently growing channel for us.”
1-800-Flowers.com hired Usablenet to build the mobile site. The retailer used the mobile sites of Amazon.com and some of the major airlines as benchmarks, aiming for simplicity and speed. Internally it created a cross-functional team of marketing, merchandising, I.T. and customer service staff members to guide content and features.
“One of the biggest things we learned was customers want to check the status of their orders—that’s a big reason they come to the standard web site,” Prasad explains. “So we made that a key feature on the mobile site, to make checking orders as easy as possible.”
Learning what makes a good mobile web site is not necessarily easy, but it’s time to start learning, experts say.
“This is not an experience you will get right the first time,” says Norman M. Sadeh, associate professor and director of the Mobile Commerce Lab at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. “But if you wait too long you will miss the opportunity to go through a trial-and-error phase, which is key. We have seen a lot of companies say we know our competitors are bound to do this and we know it is not going to be easy, so we should make any mistakes now so we can be out there successfully that much sooner.”
But some are just not happy with what can be done on a mobile web site today and hope for a brighter tomorrow in m-commerce where shoppers can browse complete web sites wherever they may be.
“Mobile-optimized sites are very dumbed-down, basic versions of web sites that remind me of web sites from the early 1990s,” says Patrick Flanagan, director of product management, retail technology, at ShopLocal LLC, a shopping portal that nonetheless offers a mobile-optimized site because, executives say, ShopLocal must be where shoppers are going. “The mobile devices are not there yet. But the iPhone is really changing that.”
Even if the mobile sites of today remind some e-commerce executives of the basic web sites of yesteryear, these executives can look to yesteryear for lessons on how to move forward with m-commerce here and now, says Umang Gupta, CEO of Keynote Systems Inc., an Internet and mobile performance management research and technology firm.
“It’s like a web presence years ago when the Internet took off—you really were at a disadvantage if you did not take off early. With mobile, you need to do it,” Gupta says. “There are a lot fewer consumers ready to do m-commerce, but it doesn’t mean you should forgo it, it just means you should have a presence, getting the brand out there, and creating a good user experience and gradually building from there.”
It all boils down to convenience, says Biddle of Netflix. “Increasingly, Internet activity isn’t just on your PC. It’s very important to note that the Internet is moving onto phones and TVs and even cars,” he says. “Shoppers want the convenience of handling things now, and that is what mobile devices offer.”
bill@verticalwebmedia.com
Click Here for the New Products & Technology Solutions Showcase
