As we discussed in a blog post last week, the mobile shopping landscape is rapidly changing, and more U.S. consumers are shopping via mobile device to both buy and redeem gift cards.
Comscore.com estimates that this holiday season alone, mobile commerce will account for $7.9 billion, representing 13 percent of total digital commerce and growing 25 percent compared with last season. At this rate, the numbers will continue to climb as mobile shopping becomes more and more widely adopted.
Retailers aren’t ignoring this trend. HP found that mobile payments are a priority for 75 percent of retailers that are likely looking to improve their bottom line. We have seen a spike in the number of retailers that have already developed mobile shopping apps to try to better reach their on-the-go customers. But they may be overlooking a critical piece of the mega-mobile bottom line opportunities: mobile customer care.
We say it often, but it doesn’t get old. Ensuring that retailer apps provide shoppers with mobile customer care is a piece of the shopping puzzle that can cripple retailers before they even realize the piece is missing. Our Mobile Shopping Cliffhanger research found that shoppers become intensely dissatisfied when they encounter trouble within apps and subsequently abandon the apps (and their carts).
Once this busy holiday shopping season is over, retailers will take a step back, recover from the rapid end of year shopping frenzy, and start pulling data to check in on their bottom lines. In addition to recapping this shopping season, we urge organizations to take this opportunity to use the data from this shopping season as they look to their 2015 mobile care strategy.
Will your bottom line be lower than expected in terms of mobile shopping profits? Want to know why? Take a look at the customer shopping experience and see how satisfied shoppers were with your app. It’s a good bet that if shoppers encountered difficulties while using your app, it had a negative impact on your holiday numbers. Don’t let this happen next year too. Take the time to find out what shoppers want from your app in terms of customer care, and implement changes before next year’s holiday season.
