Mobile Commerce Surges in Growth, Amazon Adds Fire

A woman walks into a store and is instantly greeted by an alert on her phone that offers her a discount on select products in store. As she shops she compares products and pricing using her phone as both scanner and search engine. She makes several purchases but checks out using her phone instead, and has it all shipped to her house free of charge.

Mobile technology is forcing a lot of retailers to scramble back to the drawing board and come up with new and more powerful apps that are less clumsy, more on-brand, and optimize customer service with transparency and up-to-the minute tracking of where and when they’ll get what they’re looking for.

“According to Wells Fargo research, m-commerce took home 13-percent of e-commerce earnings last year, up nearly 10-percent from last year.”

This week’s release of Amazon’s own smartphone, called Fire, only underscores the fact that mobile commerce needs to make bigger strides if retailers want to stay competitive.

According to Wells Fargo research, m-commerce took home 13-percent of e-commerce earnings last year, up nearly 10-percent from last year, and in the very near future, those numbers are only going to grow. The latest Cisco State of the Internet report says mobile devices alone would make up 57-percent of all Internet traffic by 2018, up from 33-percent last year.

The main reason why Amazon’s Fire is getting some buzz is because the phone is designed with the shopper in mind: it has a camera with unlimited photo backup and a built-in image scanning system called Firefly which reads images and QR codes and then finds them for purchase on Amazon.

The New Amazon Fire, which shipped this week, has a 4.7inch screen, unlimited photo storage, and a Firefly tool that allows consumers to take pictures of real life things they see and find them for purchase online.

The trailblazers in dynamic mobile commerce are the ones who make their apps as appealing an experience as their products or brick and mortar stores. You might not put Domino’s pizza in the “trailblazer” category but their “Domino’s tracker” allows you to see your pizza’s progress from kitchen to oven to delivery; a transparency that gives customers a feeling of comfort and control over their own unique brand experience. Equally important, the app allows the brand to track its own efficiency both in terms of QC and customer service.

Domino’s Pizza recently made a major investment in mobile applications, with a “Pizza Tracker” app and a 3-D pizza builder, creating not only mindless entertainment but transparency to the customer experience.

Nevertheless, I’d argue that the person-to-person, customer-to-store experience is still what matters most.

An app is no guarantee of a purchase but it can bring the customer closer to the brand through its efficiency, transparency, and conduit toward a community of like-minded consumers. Technology is still a tool – a critical one – but not one that can replace the emotional experience of human interaction and a personalized brand experience. But that’s only around the next corner.

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