Yigal Carmy is cofounder of JustDomobi
By Yigal Carmy Last year was definitely the Mobile First year and it was amazing. As we are all planning in earnest for the 2015 holiday season, here are a few lessons to keep in mind to make this coming December a month to remember. It is the experience, stupid. If there is one thing which is holding back mobile commerce, it is user experience. Most mobile commerce Web sites were not optimized for shopping on a 4- to 5-inch screen by users on the go. The most successful mobile shopping experiences this holiday season will enable customers to browse intuitively and then purchase painlessly. Other mobile retailers, who understood the mobile medium, will enable shoppers to find a physical store nearby to close the sale. Mobile consumers want to swipe, not click, and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. The mobile shopping cart is a critical pain point in mobile commerce. Smart mobile retailers make the payment process as easy as possible. Commerce is officially omnichannel. Though mobile is a commerce channel, commerce has become omnichannel. Each shopper will turn to the channels best suited to his or her needs to shop and ultimately buy. Some shoppers will browse in a physical store and then buy via mobile, while others will co-browse with their friends on a mobile device and then go to the physical store to make the purchase. Retailers need to support each channel with an experience that enables their shoppers to take advantage of all the opportunities that each channel has to offer. Mobile commerce needs to be supported by cross-channel marketing. In the same way that each shopper has his or her own personal channel shopping preferences, they are also influenced by different marketing channels. As our clients have seen, television campaigns drive mobile traffic in certain countries and with certain demographic groups, while Web banner, email and even print campaigns drive mobile traffic for other market segments. Ultimately, retailers need to think cross-channel when developing their marketing campaigns, testing each marketing channel to ensure that their marketing spend is optimized against their commerce goals. Do your shoppers trust your shopping cart? For most mobile commerce sites, due to SSL restrictions, the user experience in the payment section is different from the rest of the site. Though this is done for security reasons, it still brings users to a mobile page with a completely different look and feel from the rest of the mobile commerce site. Therefore, is it any surprise that only 15 percent of filled shopping carts result in a mobile purchase on a smartphone? Smartphone conversions more than double to a 35 percent shopping cart conversion rate when the purchase is completed on an SSL secure Web page which provides an identical look and feel as the rest of the mobile commerce website. Synchronize shopping carts across all devices, including mobile devices. With more shoppers shopping across multiple devices, the shopping cart experience needs to be synchronized across all devices. Despite the growth of mobile this holiday season, with the tablet becoming the shopping device of choice for many, others still prefer to close the sale and pay via their desktop PC. ALL SIGNS FROM the first two quarters of this year show that the migration to mobile commerce continues to accelerate. But we as an industry still have some work to do to make the 2015 holiday season truly magical. Yigal Carmy is cofounder of JustDomobi, a Kfar Sava, Israel-based provider of custom mobile commerce Web sites. Reach him at yigal@justdo.mobi.