When the age of smartphone dawned about five years ago, online retailers began to salivate over how they could be within reach of a vast number of shoppers at all hours of the day and how they would easily and casually end up buying a lot more than they ever had. At a time when business owners were happy merely with ways in which to advertise to phone owners, here was a new way in which to actually sell to them. But that online shopping dream has somewhat soured. It isn't that the general smartphone owning public isn't interested in shopping on their phones. It's just that retailers haven't really developed effective enough mobile sites and apps that could make the experience pleasurable.
Visit the mobile version of many online shopping sites (if those retailers have even bothered to make mobile versions), and you are quickly struck by how difficult it can be to browse anything. Nothing seems to be designed for the 3 inch screen you hold in the palm of your hand. And pages can be frustratingly slow too. Have you ever tried entering shipping information on those pages? They must've made them for the fingers of a one-year-old. These retailers therefore shouldn't really be surprised that no more than 3% of their sales come from customers on smartphones.
Retailers have done online shopping on the mobile right, really have seen spectacular returns. EBay, for instance, projects that it will earn $4 billion from customers on smartphones this year, having had a great time last year. Famous retail brand names like Bed, Bath & Beyond on the other hand, don't have mobile versions for their websites. They don't even have apps. Only one out of 10 American retailers has a website that works on smartphones. It isn't that the promise of the mobile customer has somehow faded. Customers with smartphones have been their insistent in their demand. It's just that retailers have been very slow to respond.
One of the big success stories in online shopping for the mobile has been Amazon. Amazon started developing a mobile version of its website even before the smartphone came along in the form of the iPhone. They used innovative ways in which to navigate their website like barcode scanning and auto-complete. Going online on sites like Amazon, you already have all your information on the company's servers. It can be a quick and painless experience.
Quick and painless is hardly how most mobile shoppers would describe their online shopping experience on other sites. Retailers are beginning to realize that they can't give their shoppers an experience like they would have had in 1996. There can't be dead links. Travel happens to be one of the most popular things to shop for by phone. People just love when they are standing in line somewhere or suffering through the train trip, to browse through flight options or hotel room options. A few travel websites like HipMunk have done a particularly great job here.
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