Apple has passed the one billionth device milestone this week and that means we are well on our way to ‘peak iphone’, so what does that mean for you? As we have seen over the past few weeks it the news here on M-Retailing, m-commerce is now the main driver in the e-commerce world. I never for one never tire of telling my colleagues that all e-commerce growth in December came from mobile. The news that a billion Apple devices are out there means that this is a trend that can only go up.
Figures released by SimilarWeb [IRDX VSWB] suggested that mobile accounted for 64% of visits to UK retail sites in 2015, compared to 35.5% for desktop, and its analysis found that all of the 10 leading UK retail sites, including, Amazon [IRDX RAMZ], eBay [IRDX REBY] and Argos [IRDX RARG], registered a bigger share of visits from mobile than from desktop.
But most retailers aren’t remotely ready for what this change actually means for their business. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), retailers have yet to wake up to the mobile opportunity in their industry.
Most are not on the same page as consumers when it comes to how to engage consumers with mobile in-store and most don’t get that many consumers think that the overall shopping experience in store would be enhanced if shop assistants were connected.
As I said last week, mobile is the glue that binds all this together: mobile is retail and the sooner this is put into practice the better. The fact that Apple has shifted a billion devices only makes it more imperative.
That at least is what the stats say. We are awash here at M-retailing with surveys of consumers and what they want to do and how they want to shop, but what of the retailers themselves? What do you guys think? Is all this mobile stuff just a fad? Will it change retail at the most fundamental level? Are you all just holding back from giving customers what they want or do you know what they want better than they do?
While I hear an awful lot of stuff about how you should be doing it, I don’t get much in the way of feedback from retailers as to what you see happening in your stores with mobile. Get in touch, I would love to know the other side of the story.
