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What’s The Future Of M-Commerce Look Like? Home Depot Snr. VP/IT: Customers Will Dictate Real-Time Inventory
“Technology and mobile devices make it easy to instantly jump to all of these wonderful things that they can do that are way out in the future. If you just pull up the Top 10 retailers [on mobile], and if they have a WAP site or an app, just try and navigate,” Bunner said. “It’s funny to see a lot of people making the same mistakes as 10 years ago in E-Commerce. Things are hard to navigate. You hit the wrong button, because they are too small. Pages aren’t tagged. This will be the year of better user experience on mobile, ubiquity across applications” and 2012 will be the year for fancy stuff.
Home Depot’s Kinzey laid out a more conservative future vision.
Let’s say that “you came into our store and you had a [home improvement] project going. You had part of it online, through Kitchen Design, and part of it is on your phone. We will know where all of the sources for it are and we’ll also know where all of the statuses are and be able to help you accordingly,” Kinzey said. “And you go on to whatever device and see that yourself. That’s an end-goal objective and we have a roadmap to get there from here. It shouldn’t matter to us how you sourced it. It is not something we’re doing today. I am not aware that anybody is doing it holistically all the way around the clock today, but I think everybody is probably striving for that right now.”
Ann Taylor’s Sajor made his point about the future of mobile by going backward in time—to the 1800s, to be precise.
“We all like to want to hang onto models that are rooted in 19th Century technology for some reason. What’s a cashwrap for in a store? It’s a place where you could put the great big brass register, with the big arm on the side that went ‘Ka-ching!’ Why do we need one? What’s the point? What’s it there for?” Sajor asked. “The only reason it’s there is because you still have this big thing sitting there that you have to interact with. There’s no reason why cashwrap can’t be a device sitting in the palm of the associate’s hand. Scan, scan, scan; swipe the card. Many retailers are doing this today. It works. Why is that artifact of the 1970s sitting in your store? Reclaim the space and use it more effectively.”
-Marc
April 7th, 2011 at 1:28 pm
To Mr. Concors,
Why would seeing what a person’s spend matter? I get the feeling that you care because the more they’ve spent in the past the more you’d be willing to do in order to make things better. That seems pretty short-sighted to me. One, the person lashed out on Facebook or other social site. They are spreading negative views about your company. Their audience is NOT going to ask how long they’ve been going to Pizza Hut, nor how much they’ve spent there in the past. They’re going to want to here the story of how your company has done them wrong. Second, it’s been a long accepted position that it’s cheaper to keep customers than get them. Here, you’ve gotten both customers – one a short time and the other a long time. But you did get them… And now you’re concern is how much they’ve spent over the years? I’d be willing to bet that unless it was something absolutely ridiculous (in which case write either one off as a customer), the long term customer is going to come back after cooling off about it anyway. Regardless, the person has started a personal advertising campaign that will be global and archived for future generations that’s counter to your brand. No one outside of you cared how much they spend there. That’s what the focus needs to be.
Rob