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U.S. Retailers Tip-Toe Through Mobile Commerce Minefields
In some ways, the current state of M-Commerce is reminiscent of the days before broadband Internet access was widely available. Companies with fancy Web sites risked angering users still stuck with dial-up, folks who didn’t want to wait five minutes for complex pages to load. With mobile, retailers need to strike a balance, presenting sites with enough functionality to enable decent product search, selection and payment while remaining cognizant that not everybody owns an iPhone (and even those that do are limited by that device’s restrictions). Indeed, only about five percent of cellphone users have joined the Apple-ites. “There are still tens of millions of Motorola RAZRs out there,” Slezak said. “You don’t want to alienate them but you still want to give those with the better phones the best experience possible to turn them into (Mobile Web) junkies.”
Today, the iPhone may be the most powerful M-Commerce platform, but it’s way of presenting data sometimes presents limitations that less sophisticated phones avoid. (On our own site, the iPhone has difficulty seeing stories with multiple pages, something much lower-level phones can handle easily. Apple’s going its own proprietary way is not always a plus.)
The list of M-Commerce challenges and potential pitfalls is long and subject to debate. Some, such as the high expense of mobile data plans and the painfully slow rollout of high-speed (3G and beyond) wireless networks in the U.S., involve issues beyond the control of tech teams working on M-Commerce deployments. However, there are plenty of M-Commerce headaches that are primarily technological in nature:
Some of these issues are major obstacles, but little things can also effectively mess up an M-Commerce site. It won’t take long for impatient mobile users to give up if retail sites force them to scroll in various directions or otherwise search for tools, such as “Add to Cart” buttons. This is triply true if the site design doesn’t indicate to the user that there is anything they need to search for.
Another booby-trap is a site’s shipping and payment procedure. Filling out forms is bad enough with a full-size keyboard. Doing it with a cellphone is enough to make even the most enthusiastic M-Commerce experimenter disconnect.
-Marc
August 21st, 2009 at 5:42 am
Very well written piece. Thank you. The Amazon experience is amazing and gives them yet another leg up on brick & mortar. By the time traditional retailers figure this out I (and others?) will have already emotionally, habitually, and financially committed themselves to Amazon’s experience for many products, and to your point, leave them where they were in the dialup-to-broadband transition years.