Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

“If all they ever want to do is extend their Web site or somehow kind of dumb-down their site so it can be consumed on any mobile device, that’s a first step,” said Dave Sikora, CEO/Founder at Digby. “But while that appears easy on the surface, there are complexities even there that have to be addressed: How do you test it on all the devices out there? Is there a testing lab that’s common for people to plug into? How do I know what my site going to look like on AT&T’s network versus Verizon’s network versus Sprint’s? Can we simulate what the site is going to look like with one bar of service versus five bars? How does the Google Android phone process this color orange versus the RAZR, which maybe can’t process images and colors in exactly the same way?”

It takes a pretty smart phone to deliver a decent M-Commerce experience and phones have come a long way in terms of smarts. Most experts trace the current smartphone boom back to the June 2007 launch of the iPhone. That’s more than two years ago, virtually a lifetime in the world of technology, and yet the number of fully-functional, multi-channel retailer M-Commerce sites can still be counted on one hand, give or take a few fingers.

Sears’ Emmons said it took him about two years to “learn the field,” to a point where he felt comfortable with M-Commerce. Because of the steep learning curve, retailers that have yet to really focus on mobile risk being left behind. “It shocks me that more companies aren’t getting involved and getting involved faster,” he said.

Sears, which outsourced the creation of mobile sites for Sears and K-Mart, explored crafting the sites in-house but eventually pulled the plug. “What we saw was that doing it ourselves was going to be prohibitively expensive regardless of the business case,” Emmons said. He said that, while Sears used a third-party to build the sites, it was still crucial for the company to form a special M-Commerce team separate from the existing E-Commerce group. “We have a dedicated mobile team,” Emmons said. “You can’t just have a Web site team that’s already super-busy and doesn’t have the time and budget, doing mobile. The online team doesn’t understand mobile and they don’t think it’s important enough for them to spend their time on.”

As if the technical barriers aren’t enough, there’s also the question of ROI. Many big retailers are just now “starting to believe that people will buy things on a mobile device” and are “slowly and gradually” embracing M-Commerce, said Ran Farmer, managing director of Netbiscuits, a company that creates mobile sites and sells a platform allowing business to make their own.

Cisco in late 2008 conducted a detailed analysis of mobile sites and their functionality and found that only 12 percent of the 65 mobile retail sites it tested allowed for mobile transactions, said Edward Westenberg, director of Cisco Internet Business Solutions Retail and Consumer Products division.

That’s double the number found a year earlier. Interestingly, the report uses the word “transaction” leading one to believe it means “purchase.” However, one of the mobile sites Cisco lists as being transaction-capable, the one deployed by Walgreens, offers prescription refill and status checks but no product purchases. (To be fair, prescription refills are certainly revenue to pharmacy chains, but the very nature of medical prescriptions makes them simply nothing like product sales at most retail chains.)