Ginger Conlon at 1to1 Media recently touched upon the coming wave of Mobile e-Commerce. It is a logical next step in a world that is becoming increasingly mobile, and a mobile world where the technology is making leaps forward in the area of applications delivered to mobile devices, specifically SmartPhones. The next generation of e-Commerce will allow for users to easily and quickly browse products and place orders on-the-go. Conlon points to a report by Gartner Research VP Gene Alvarez, who lists five points to keep in mind in the area of mobile e-Commerce:
- Customers want to choose how your organization interactions with them and informs them about products, promotions, and the like.
- A company’s mobile e-commerce capabilities should not be isolated from other mobile phone capabilities, like SMS, nor should they be isolated from other interaction points.
- Mobile users will want content that is in context with what they’re doing.
- Maintaining context is paramount, but enterprises need to consider industry regulations.
- Companies have the potential to see significant results by capitalizing on GPS location-based services
Mobile e-Commerce has not taken off as of yet because even today, navigating the mobile web is difficult. Even pages that are WAP-formatted tend to be minimalistic and not provide a robust user interface. Enter the App concept popularized by Apple’s iPhone and adapted by every major SmartPhone manufacturer, and you have a recipe for e-Commerce success.
The Chipotle Restaurant chain provides a good example of the future of mobile e-Commerce. In their newly released App for the iPhone, users are given a robust and intuitive user interface to customize and order their burritos. The app also uses GPS capabilities to locate the nearest restaurant, and place the order at that location.
The app provides a benchmark for how eCommerce apps can and should be designed. Mobile applications are part of the future of CRM and providing customers with the needed tools to interact and buy on-the-go will help to provide that ultimate customer experience, and provide a customer retention advantage to any companies with enough foresight to deploy it.
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