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Going beyond the iPhone


ay “mobile commerce” to customers and many of them will instantly think of the iPhone. While this isn’t wrong, especially given the buzz around it, I urge people to think beyond the iPhone and consider the following


elements as part of a mobile strategy as well. Mobile web


This is your low-hanging fruit. When you already have a website or online shop, deriving a mobile front end from it is not a complicated task. If you can resist the temptation of falling for a short-term, tactical point solution and use your well-established online platform, you’ll find yourself reusing many things, such as business models and processes.


Mobile barcodes Best Buy is probably the first, and one of the


few retailers to use mobile barcodes widely in-store and on its products. The company recognised what mobile can do for its business, in both negative and positive ways. Today, competitor number one for high-street retailers is not the store a few yards down the road—it’s Amazon. It became very easy for


anyone to walk into a store, snap a picture of a product they like and then have Amazon fulfil the order. All the high-street retailers are left with are the costs for running the store and displaying the product. Mobile barcodes can help to direct the


customer to the retailer’s website where he or she may find more information about the product, compare prices or other useful things such as watch videos of the product in use, or access exclusive content. Further, the retailer has increased the chances that customers will stay and buy, because it delivered exactly what they were looking for.


Mobile barcodes can be easily integrated


into print catalogues and billboards, bridging the chasm between offline and online easily. In the long-run, near field communication (NFC) certainly has the potential to replace mobile barcodes. Whilst they are not yet widely spread, mobile barcodes are certainly a very good medium-term solution, which is easy to implement and roll out.


Short text messages (SMS) Depending on your market or target group,


SMS is another component you should consider. In emerging markets such as Africa, SMS is certainly a more interesting option than mobile web. However, in second-world markets, SMS can add some interesting value to your offering. You could, for instance, inform your customer via text message when a shipment has left the warehouse. Alternatively, you could enrich your marketing campaign by adding a short code message such as “Text Summer to 22334”, which a customer might find easier than scanning a barcode or typing a URL into his mobile. Once this has been sent, customers will receive a message containing a link to the mobile landing page of that campaign.


Native apps Probably the most talked about aspect of a


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mobile strategy, and something that people sometimes forget about native apps, is that they limit themselves from the very beginning to very small target groups. For example, the iPhone operating system iOS only has a 25 percent share of all mobile devices, so you have cut out a very large portion of your potential customer base by excluding other operating systems.


Direct Commerce Catalogue e-business www.catalog-biz.com By Stefan Schmidt


Location-based services Ultimately, this will go far beyond using the


GPS information from a device to locate the nearest store. Yet it depends greatly on the success of location-based social applications such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Once they are widespread, utilising them for marketing efforts could become really interesting. From providing offers when a customer checks in somewhere to providing rival offers when a customer checks in with the competition.


Customer service Last but not least, make sure that customer


service is included as a priority in your mobile strategy. It really can harm your reputation if a customer contacts your customer service team regarding an order and the agent cannot locate orders from mobile because they are held in another silo. Even though all your silos are synchronised at some point, asking customers to call back a few hours later isn’t the best thing to do, especially if you want to do business with them more than once. Finally, remember that mobile is the glue


between your customer touchpoints and will help you to lift your combined bottom line. It might not generate lots of revenue in isolation but it will greatly influence the other channels.


Stefan Schmidt is director of product strategy at multichannel commerce software vendor Hybris.


Getting found in the ever-growing app store,


becomes another challenge as does ensuring that your customers even use your application, if it doesn’t offer anything above and beyond the mobile web. Smartphone owners use, on average, seven apps regularly. Good luck getting into that top seven! This suggests that your mobile app has to be the Rolls’ Royce in your fleet of mobile customer touchpoints. A “me too” app simply will not cut it. Also, keep in mind that you have to develop and maintain a native app for each major mobile operating system; iOS, Android and RIM, the operating system used by BlackBerry. These are costs you won’t have with the mobile web.


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