First Look: Mobile Optimization Study

Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

Main Takeaways:

• "We are now at the beginning of the experience economy".

• Retailers are looking for a way to turn mobile browsers into mobile buyers.

• Millennials seem to be at the forefront of a data revolution.

• Mobile customers tend to commit to a purchase when they feel that their personal information is secure.

• Can mobile-commerce really beat out desktop conversions?

How to Win Customers and Influence People to Purchase Mobily:

• Paypal (Braintree), Magento, and Hi Conversion are working together, along with other merchants and system integrators on The Mobile eCommerce Optimization Initiative to share data on the best (and worst) practices in conversion to sales in the mobile-commerce space.

• CEO of HI Conversion Zee Aganovic says that retailers took about 10-15 years to truly understand desktop-based (traditional) e-commerce.

• According to Zee the invention of mobile brought new challenges as the mobile-commerce customer is entirely different.

• Since individual merchants cannot handle the enormity of addressing their mobile-customer base by themselves (especially when they are competing with behemoths like Amazon), system integrators are teaming up to bridge the gap.

• Fun fact: Mobile is quickly becoming a much bigger piece of retail revenue, on Black Friday, mobile-based sales accounted for almost 40%, even though Black Friday is much more of an in-store shopping holiday.

• "This is all about experience economy + invent of mobile".

• The purpose of this community is to immediately provide value to merchants, where they get access to experience optimization tools, and community data (on par with the largest e-commerce companies) on what actually works, and what doesn't.

• Brian loves the idea of merchants sharing data to address markets because this makes it easier for merchants to achieve scalable results.

• Also, Amazon apparently has teams to address 1-click optimization, and probably everything else.

Proper Data Usage Can Prevent Resource-Allocation Death Spirals:

• Phillip and Brian interview Hasan Elkomey, the SVP of strategic partnerships at Redstage, an e-commerce company with a focus on B2B.

• Philip asks how Redstage is helping retailers to become more data-centric, and how they can properly utilize this crowdsourced data to improve outcomes for customers?

• Hasan hits on a critical point: Sometimes data-based solutions seem minuscule but are incredibly effective: One test proved that adding a padlock to the checkout button improved conversion rates by 17.37%.

• Perhaps because customers feel more secure entering their payment details when they feel the website they are purchasing from is more secure?

• Data can also be used to justify budget-based decisions, allocation of resources, or cuts to funding, Phillip refers to this as the "death spiral".

• Hasan refers to himself as a grey-area millennial, and millennials seem to be leading the charge on proper data acquisition and usage by investing serious resources in doing so.

• Millennials are at the forefront of digital transformation in e-commerce.

• So how can merchants get involved in this initiative?

• All any interested party has to do is go to mobileoptimized.org and sign up, and it really is all about the data: The more community data that becomes available, the more merchants will be able to utilize that data to produce optimal results conversion-wise in the mobile-commerce space.

Mobile vs. Desktop: Battle of The Buying Power:

• Brent Peterson, Chief Evangelist for Wagento Creative, goes to bat for mobile, saying that new studies are proving that mobile-sales could, in fact, outperform desktop browse-to-buy conversion.

• One of these studies involves a security icon being added to the checkout page, ensuring the customer that all their information is encrypted and safe, and while this only increased conversion by 7% on desktop, mobile had an increase of 17.37%, which is pretty spectacular.

• One test that seemed to fail, surprisingly enough: Autofilling zip codes, which actually had a negative impact on conversion for mobile users.

• Brian says that this data can help other retailers learn from these results, taking the ideas out of the realm of the possible, by putting some structure behind it.

• Brent makes it clear that these results are not necessarily uniform across demographics.

• "Challenge assumptions and use data to prove out outcomes".

• Wagento has offices all over the world, including an office in Minnesota.

Guests:

• Zee Aganovic of Hi Commerce
• Hasan Elkomey of Redstage
• Brent Peterson of Wagento

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