Innovation in Action
The number of online shoppers that are no longer content to do their comparison shopping at home tethered to a PC is rising.  Consumers want to use their mobile phones to find deals on the run, or even comparison shop while they are on the high street.  Big names in retail recognise this trend and are creatively harnessing the power of mobile to ensure that they are reaching their customers in the most direct way possible.
 
As the habits of online shoppers change, they foretell changes in other mobile markets as well.  Mobile is a 24x7 online phenomenon and people are more likely to forget their wallets than their mobile devices when on the move.  They want to shop, bank, check for weather and news updates or just about anything else whenever and wherever they please. If you want to reach these consumers, you want to make sure your content and applications are available and performing well.

Whatever your business – whether online, bricks & mortar, or both – it’s time to consider developing a mobile strategy in the coming year. A year ago, 60 percent of the people in the world owned mobile phones and roughly five percent of all online traffic originated from mobile devices. According to Gartner, this year has seen global smartphone sales increased by 49% in the first quarter alone.  Due to the increased popularity and improved functionality of smartphones, mobile’s percentage of online traffic is destined to continue to rise.
 
Copying best online practices is an easy first step in developing a mobile strategy, but the next step, executing it properly, is a challenge that is much more difficult than you might think.  Most importantly, getting it right increases customer satisfaction and reduces calls to customer care – getting it wrong does the opposite.

How Much Does Poor Performance Cost?
Everyone who moves to mobile quickly becomes aware of the technical challenges. Screens are smaller, latency is higher and just because performance is great on one carrier in one region doesn’t mean that it’s the same on another carrier in the same region or elsewhere in the country.
 
Until recently, retailers that embraced mobile had to scale down their “heavy” Web sites to accommodate the slow download on common mobile devices. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) allowed them to create simple sites capable of delivering simple content to the masses. In the early days of mobile, few retailers felt a substantial revenue impact when the service went down; consequently far too little attention was paid to performance.
 
The smartphone has changed the equation. Whether it’s with a customisable downloadable app or on a rich, optimised HTML site, consumers are using their mobile devices to reach out to retailers and their expectations are high. The financial consequences of slow performance or lack of availability are now significant – poor performance leads to shopping cart abandonment.
 
Historically speaking, the popular retail application in mobile has been SMS.  It’s a relatively simple concept: set up a Common Short Code and deliver promotional messages to users who’ve opted-in.  As retailers have been able to see the revenue-generating impact of implementing a successful Common Short Code, they’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of maintaining healthy performance standards.
 
Today, retailers know that there’s a strong and quantifiable correlation between a successful SMS campaign and revenue. This connection will only become stronger in the years to come. Real money is being exchanged over SMS, which has become the backbone for mobile payments. And it’s not just SMS – many retailers are beginning to use downloadable apps for coupons and as virtual gift cards as well. As mobile becomes an increasingly important part of the retail experience, the performance levels for mobile applications and services become key metrics for retailers and enterprises alike. When they aren’t at peak performance, business isn’t either.
 
Keeping Your Doors Open
As shoppers grow to depend on mobile, the financial impact of slow or unavailable content and applications becomes ever clearer.  If retail customers can’t get what they want in a reasonable amount of time, they are likely to abandon the content or service. And once they’re gone, don’t expect them to come back. It’s probably not realistic to think that mobile applications, content, and services will be available for rapid download 100 percent of the time. But, if you’re currently available 96 percent of the time and can close the gap to 98 percent – it’s like being open for business seven additional days per year. The best way to ensure that your customers can access your mobile applications and services to get what they need is rather straightforward. Find problems before your customers do and fix them before they find out. The first step in improving mean-time-to-repair is continual monitoring.
 
You want an efficient, automated solution with the ability to receive customised alarms when performance thresholds are not met – from slowdowns to absolute site failure. In addition, you want your monitoring solution to display results in a collaborative environment for rapid debugging of failures and to facilitate root cause analysis.  Finally, monitoring should be done outside of your systems’ firewalls to get the most accurate performance measurement – that of an end user.

It’s clear that retailers which don’t have a bespoke mobile strategy will start to fall behind competitors this year. While mobile retailing still only makes up a relatively small proportion of e-commerce as a whole, it is clear that this is shifting and retailers need to be aware of these changes and prepared for an influx of mobile customers.