Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of an article from Retail Paradox, Retail Systems Research's weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers.
Two weeks ago, I sat at a round table with six CIOs from an array of retail verticals at RIS News' Executive Summit event. Since the conversation was pretty candid, I won't share who was at my table. But we had grocery, entertainment, luxury, and sporting goods represented. Our objective in the breakout session was to come up with and address some of the issues that mobile commerce faces currently. One of the elementary questions that came up was where to start.
The clear consensus at the table was to make your existing e-commerce site mobile-friendly as soon as possible -- and that did include evaluating how important Flash really is to you. The problem with this endeavor is that it seems to be leading to round two of the e-commerce platform refresh, this time with a heavy emphasis on back end around content management. You need a very strong content management system if you want to make your site mobile-friendly. And even once you've done that, the biggest challenge, according to the CIOs at the table, is maintaining a quality user experience on mobile. This isn't because of challenges with detecting mobile devices or browsers, but because mobile players are unlocking more and new features every day, and it's hard to keep up with that evolution in terms of what a retailer site might leverage.
The good news is that it's relatively cheap to experiment and play around with the front-end mobile experience while doing the heavy lifting on the back-end improvements to make a robust mobile capability available.
Within the context of mobile-enabling the existing e-commerce site, most of the retailers at the table were exploring core things, not trying to completely mobilize the existing site. It's already clear to them that not everything on their site today is going to be useful in a mobile context, but that has led them to the flip side -- what are the mobile-specific things that need to be enabled? In other words, at what point will the mobile experience diverge from the online experience? And do you really want to go down that road? That question got no answers from those of us at the table.
But I'll leave you with one very pragmatic piece of advice from my very pragmatic CIOs. The best tactic for getting mobile projects going is to give your CEO a bunch of mobile devices (iPads a plus for sure). But if you do that, you better make sure to give the same set of devices to your help desk first.
Discussion Questions: What will likely be the biggest challenges as e-commerce strategies are tied to m-commerce? On the other hand, at what point will the mobile experience diverge from the online experience?