Bridal retailer David’s Bridal launched a mobile site that puts it in the minority of m-retailers: the site has been optimized to support purchases as well as allow consumers to browse the gowns. The company partnered with Usablenet to achieve this feet, Mobile Commerce Daily reports.
For the most part, consumers don’t expect to be able to make purchases, especially complex ones, via a mobile device—unless it is a tablet. New figures from Pew Internet found that more than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during the 2011 holiday season to seek help with purchasing decisions.
They used their phones to call a friend for advice. They also used their phones to compare prices. Taken together, just over half (52%) of all adult cell owners used their phone for at least one of these three reasons over the holiday shopping season and one third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information.
A Bad Shopping Experience
Not many consumers will make a mobile purchase unless they have to—despite the growth of m-commerce buying an item from a mobile device can be cumbersome. However, those that do are not easily forgiving of a bad experience. Also, numerous studies show that m-commerce is growing. So while retailers may be able to get away with sites optimized to provide just information and pricing for the time being, they won’t in the long run.
20% of mobile shoppers respond to a bad shopping experience on their mobile device by completing their research and/or purchase but vowing to never return to the site in the future if they can avoid it, with a further 18% saying they abandon the site and seek alternative brands using their device, according to a survey by Limelight Networks.
Data from the survey indicates that the remaining 62% of mobile shoppers abandon the site on their mobile device and return to the site at a later date using a computer. According to Limelight, though, this remains a sub-optimal result: the retailer has still lost the immediate purchase and cannot guarantee that the buyer will ultimately complete the purchase.
