Partner Article

Mobile Technologly in Retail

In the last ten years, the way we engage with technology has drastically changed how we buy and view the things we want in life. Two of the technologies that have been at the heart of how we run our lives, the Internet and mobile phones, are now converging at an incredible rate. The prospect of an etail-world governed by a users mobile phone is a tantalising one for any retailer. The mobile phone has become an extension to our personality and it offers an immediate channel which to communicate directly with potential customers, customising advertorial content and the online shopping experience. This of course is easier said than done. To communicate your message in a highly competitive environment is a problem that most E-Commerce Directors across the UK will be busily working out how to get ahead of the game.

To begin to try and solve the problem we must first understand how the technology has changed user behaviour. In the past the largest surges of traffic would be seen on a Monday morning, when customers would look for the best deals online, having researched their potential purchase over the weekend, but this is no longer the case.

The advent of smart devices, in particular tablets, has meant that browsing online is no longer an anti-social thing to do at home, you are no longer confined to the single PC in a home office. Families can now surf on the sofa and it has become a much more collaborative experience. It means that potential customers can start to play a much greater part for online businesses, as customers are far more likely to be able to search online as soon as they see an advert.

The browsing stage starts on the High Street or certainly when the user is on the go. It’s in response to something they’ve seen in a shop or on a billboard and they’ll often start browsing on their mobile devices to compare prices or to drill for more product information. It’s at this point that a potential new customer interacts with your business and this is where the all important customer experience begins.

This, for me, is where responsive web design will begin to play such a pivotal role, as mobile and tablets saturate the market further. As the customer browses your website across all devices, starting on mobile but more likely converting on tablet or PC, what can matter the most to the conversion is consistency. A responsive web design changes the layout of the page and the images to format correctly on any screen size ensuring that images and key messages are relayed across all devices, guaranteeing the customer experience is a consistent one. Over the coming years, retaining customers as they jump from device to device along their journey to purchase, will be where retailers will win or lose.

At Cloggs, we launched our responsive website on August 21st and we instantly improved user engagement on the mobile and tablet optimised form of the site. The biggest change was the speed at which users were able to browse the site with the average page load time reducing by up to 40%. Since then, we’ve seen the conversion rate on tablets start to exceed that of the conventional desktop conversion rate, a strong signal that customers are using their mobiles to browse and their tablets to purchase.

There is no doubt, for me that the use of mobiles phones and tablets in retailing represents a paradigm shift in user behaviour and all retailers whether focussed online or offline need to find their own solution on to cope with it.

Chris Thomas, managing director of Cloggs

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Cloggs .