Traditional methods that retailers used to attract and retain consumers simply don’t work with millennials, and retailers must adapt if they are to remain – or become – relevant to this important segment. Some analysts are even foreshadowing imminent retail spending stagnation unless the purchasing power of the millennial segment can be unlocked.

While we agree there are challenges, we also believe some solutions are well within reach. Spend some time talking with 18-34 year-olds and you’ll learn a great deal. At Affirm, we continue to do just that, and we have a simple set of actions that can help you start breaking through.

These include a focus on convenience and control, a shift in the ways these shoppers discover and learn about your products, and a recognition that millennials have different views about money. For each, we recommend simply that you meet them where they are.

Here are a few things we’ve learned that can help get you started:

Customer Service, Convenience and Control

It used to be the case that exceptional customer service was reserved for those who shopped with high-end retailers. Today, every retailer needs to provide it. Millennials are demanding to try your products – at their convenience – and make decisions at their leisure: Ship it for free; Return with no cost or hassle; Pile up the reward points for loyalty; Offer a multitude of payment options, and don’t force anyone to pick up the phone for customer service.

Millennials not only want a choice among the products they’re shopping for, they want control in the process. Our advice: give it to them.

Product Discovery Channels have Changed

If you’re pouring resources into your SEO “strategy,” you likely aren’t driving a large number of millennial clicks. This generation isn’t relying on Google, they’re looking to industry trendsetters and influencers to inform them. Honing in on those influencers requires not only knowing your audience, but also the the people influencing your audience.

Millennials are following influencers on Instagram and Snapchat to keep up with what’s new and hot, while great content remains king on Facebook. People looking for home gadgets or trendy gear aren’t relying on content provided by retailers – they trust The Sweethome and The Wirecutter for unbiased reviews and bulletproof testing, for example, and they’re keeping up with Product Hunt for the latest in tech.

Knowing and figuring out how to organically engage through natural discovery channels will help your marketing team better connect with shoppers early on in their journeys.

Millennials Think Differently When it Comes to Spending

This generation does not use credit cards the way other demographic groups have. In fact, the percentage of Americans under 35 who have a credit card is the lowest it has been since the Federal Reserve started tracking data in 1989. An incredible two-thirds of millennials do not own a credit card.

Credit cards have traditionally accelerated and simplified purchases, but how can you build relationships with this cohort averse to open-ended debt? Consider offering alternative options, such as short-term financing. Breaking down large purchases into predictable, affordable monthly payments has proven to resonate well with the millennial buyer who sees spending through a lens of monthly cash flow, and it can be used as a marketing lever – not just a payment option.

As with any marketing challenge, there is no single tool to address all the concerns and objections. But if you’re a brand in pursuit of millennials, continuing to leverage old-school tactics will continue to net you old-school buyers. By simply establishing a checklist of actionable goals and checking them off one-by-one, retailers can make real strides at addressing the needs of millennials. This generation is very large, they’re young and they’re here to stay. Don’t ask them to meet you on your turf…reach out and meet them where they are, and watch how well they respond.

           

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We’ll be in booth #8000 showcasing some of our great brands including Cole Haan, Suit Supply and Godiva, and will have four demo areas including two point-of-sale stations to demonstrate the transformative capability of Demandware Store, a POS and in-store operations solution which will be available later this year.

We’ll also be showcasing Predictive Intelligence capabilities which enable retailers to create personalized, relevant shopping experiences across web, email and, increasingly, the store. Avenue Stores and Skis.com are two companies which have already experience the benefit of Predictive Email and Predictive Recommendations, respectively.

At the same time, several people from Salesforce will be in booth #8000 with us, talking about the transformative nature of the cloud, which our customers are embracing as the foundation for growth and innovation. Going forward, our customers will be able to leverage Salesforce’s leading sales, service, marketing, communities, analytics, IoT and platform solutions, transforming how they interact with consumers in new, more personalized and smarter ways.

This is incredibly exciting and dynamic time in our industry. I don’t need to tell you that consumers’ shopping behavior is driving dramatic changes in the way you engage with your customers. That includes the way you market, communicate with, sell to, service and understand your customers.

We look forward to seeing you at Shop.org to share how you can connect to your customers in a whole new way.

           

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The same parallels can be drawn for retail stores, which are not only not being rendered obsolete by digital but are in fact being greatly enhanced by it.

Here are five ways in which digital is good for the store:

•       Associate productivity

Providing employees with mobile POS and store operations applications is one way to increase productivity.

o   Easy to use

•   Have you ever experienced a checkout with an associate in training? The transaction probably took longer than expected and was sprinkled with comments like ‘I’m sorry, I’m new’ or ‘Hold on. Let me get the manager to help.’ That’s because traditional point-of-sale systems are not user friendly and require a steep learning curve. On the flip side, you have probably seen toddlers playing with mobile phones; the device is so intuitive that even a preschooler can figure out how to access YouTube and watch their favorite show before you even realize it’s happening. The point is, associates are already thoroughly familiar with mobile devices. If your POS leveraged existing technology, even brand new employees would be more effective with store technology.

o   Return of the associate as expert and trusted adviser

•   Few can argue that today’s consumer, with access to products, pricing and inventory via mobile devices, is better informed than most store associates. But what if associates had access to the same information – and more – than customers? Now the associate becomes an expert providing additional value to shoppers in the store. By providing consistent value to customers, through deep knowledge, retailers can truly differentiate their brand from competitors.

•       Omnichannel integration

By digitizing the store, the once competing channels of store and online can focus on the same thing – increasing sales.  In fact, leveraging digital channels can actually drive additional traffic into the stores. Here’s how:

o   Closest store, inventory or pickup

•   Browsing online but want something now? What a great way for digital to drive customers into stores for that immediate gratification than by leveraging your online or mobile site to direct customers to their closets stores with assured access to inventory. Or order something now and pick up at the store.

o   Product information

•   Blend physical and digital by giving customers the information they expect online with the experience they want in store.

o   Carts as wish lists

•   The shopping cart is quickly becoming consumers’ favorite way to save items or create wish lists. According to the Mobile Shopping Focus Report “73% of online shoppers use the shopping cart to store items to buy later.” With more and more mobile users unable to function without their phone nearby, the mobile cart is quickly becoming a way for shoppers and retailers to unify online and offline retail.

•       Engage consumers

Digital interaction in the store helps engage consumers in new ways.  By offering customers, especially millennials, digital store experiences, stores can expand opportunities for conversion.

o   Interactive kiosks allow consumers to self-serve, learning more about products which can lead to greater interest and interaction with a store associate to convert the sale.

o   Smart dressing rooms allow retailers to surpass the physical limitations of the retail space by offering customers a 360 degree view of outfits and alternative lighting. They can even analyze a customer’s features to make flattering product recommendations.

•       Personalization

Consumers’ view of personalization is being shaped by today’s digital experiences where they receive tailored offers and recommendations while shopping online or via a mobile device.  This same experience is hard for an instore associate to deliver.  However, digital technologies such as geolocation, a combination of location based technologies and a consumer mobile device, are allowing retailers to recognize consumers in a whole new way.

In addition to geolocating, stores can also take advantage of mobile loyalty which allows stores to identify a consumer before making a decision in order to better influence the purchase decision.

•       Streamline operations

Digital is enormously important for improving retail operations.  There is a great deal of time spent on paper-based manual tasks in the store, and by digitizing these tasks not only are you able to reduce time spent, but also increase efficiency. For example, associates can be alerted on their mobile when inventory is low vs. waiting to to run an end of day report; or they can dynamically reassign resources based on real-time information on peaks of the day. In the not-too-distant future, managers will be able to run their entire store operations from their palm of their hand.

Digital is not the enemy of the store. It is an integral part of the store of today and the store of the future. The only reason brick and mortar retailers should fear digital is if they fail to embrace it in one or, hopefully all, of the ways mentioned here.

It’s worth remembering that music videos didn’t kill radio, and neither has music streaming. In fact, Pew Research Center finds that 93% of Americans listen to AM/FM radio, higher than television viewership. Interestingly, that’s about the same percentage of retail (give or take) that still takes place in stores.

           

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The NRF reported that spending will reach $75.8 billion this year, up from $68 billion in 2015. Much of that spending, of course, will be online. During these peak shopping periods (on top of other important considerations) retailers must consider the impact that their fraud prevention techniques have on consumers’ all important checkout experience.

Gartner reported this year that, “Web commerce has shifted the role of fraud detection from the arcane back office loss prevention department to being front and center in the customer experience.”

Fraud prevention occurs at the precise moment of order completion, and traditional antifraud practices often intrude into that experience, as they rely on manual reviews and a rules engine that helps to filter orders. In the normal course of business, this results in delays in confirmation and fulfillment for orders which need review, as each review takes several minutes. It also means that some legitimate customers are rejected by rules that are too rigid to take any specific circumstances into account.

During the holidays, these problems are exacerbated. Even when ecommerce merchants take on extra reviewers, a flood of orders means extended delays. That isn’t good for customer experience or retention even during slow periods, but during peak periods it can often result in a lost sale. If a customer doesn’t receive order confirmation at once, they will go elsewhere.

Additionally, every holiday season is a little different, reflecting changing buying trends and needs. Rules, which already require calibrating in advance of the holiday period, are often slow to adapt to such changes once it has begun. The less tailored the system is to the reality of the shopping season, the more orders will be reviewed and mistakenly rejected.

It is, perhaps, even more of a challenge this holiday season, as consumers increasingly turn to mobile devices to shop. One study found that back-to-school shoppers this year are roughly evenly divided between desktop and mobile devices. Yet few merchants take a mobile-first approach to fraud prevention. And they need to be – a recent Forrester report discussed the particular problems posed by mobile, and recommended that when it comes to mobile, retailers “must be prepared to ask tough questions when evaluating vendors.”

Turning Customers Away at Checkout

False declines, the orders which are actually good but are rejected out of an over-abundance of caution, are more of a problem than many merchants realize. Business Intelligence recently reported that false declines are becoming a more costly problem than actual fraud. In 2016, US ecommerce merchants will lose over $2 billion more in falsely declined transactions than they’ll save in fraud they prevent!

Like other glitches in the fraud prevention system, false declines are especially problematic during the holidays. Overloaded reviewers are more likely to decline if they’re uncertain about a transaction, rather than spend time trying to verify it, and rules which aren’t entirely up to date are more likely to make the mistake.

It’s hard to blame the fraud team, considering the ingenuity of the fraudsters. Online fraud attacks grew 215% in 2015, and more fraudsters are moving online now that microchip cards have made “card present” fraud more difficult. Thieves can also get up to speed fast thanks to a sophisticated ecosystem that includes theft tools and easily-accessible stolen data.

You can’t compromise when it comes to fraud prevention. But what online merchants can and should do is shift their checkout from being fraud-focused to being customer-centered. What does that mean?

• A high level of accuracy, which enables the system to treat customers as innocent unless proven guilty, rather than the other way around.

• An end to manual reviews and rules. Machine learning, which gets smarter with every transaction, has made full automation of fraud prevention a real possibility.

• Seamless scaling. Merchants who receive an exponential number of orders during holiday will no longer have to worry about coping with holiday fraud review. Automation means automatic, all the time.

• Real time order confirmation. That means confirmation can be real-time, and fulfillment never delayed because of fraud prevention.

• The complex buying scenarios common in today’s connected world, where people move between devices, ship to offices or hotels while traveling, and even share accounts, are accommodated, with false declines all but disappearing.

With back-to-school in full swing and the winter holidays just around the corner, it’s time for online retailers to start thinking seriously about whether their checkout is set to provide the ideal customer experience today’s consumer expects. If their fraud prevention is likely to prove more of an obstacle than a help to that goal, then it’s time for a new, customer-centered approach.

           

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By now it’s plainly obvious that many people cannot function without their phones. This holiday shopping season may be the first where most people cannot shopwithout their phones.

This has huge implications for retailers, as those who don’t take a mobile-firstapproach will be left behind by more fleet-footed competitors. According to the Q1 Demandware Shopping Index, phones accounted for 45% of traffic to retail sites, and 25% of orders.

How can retailers optimize their mobile presence to engage with and retain easily distracted, impatient shoppers?

First and foremost, mobile site design and functionality must cater to the unique needs of mobile users, starting with large and persistent search boxes. On mobile, site search usage is 44% higher with a persistent search box expanded in the header. It’s no secret that friction in the checkout process gums up the works of mobile commerce, so optimizing your checkout glow is absolutely vital. Apple Pay for the web, for one, promises to accelerate the checkout and payment flow, and has the potential to increase conversion and drive higher order share on phones.

Just as mobile users have unique needs, mobile device provide retailers with unique advantages, like geolocation, which should be leveraged to the fullest. Retailers should use geolocation to suggest the nearest store – it is one of the top use cases on mobile – and link to phone numbers and other contact information. This is enormously important as many mobile users will search for a brand not to shop but for the express purpose of finding a store.

And speaking of store, during holiday, retailers should cater to last-minute shoppers by driving them from their mobile device into the store, particularly once free shipping deadlines have passed. Retailers should promote the expertise of store associates to help shoppers find the perfect gift.

On mobile, more so than on the full web, shoppers will quickly abandon a site for poor performance. In fact, the optimum load time for a mobile site is about four seconds – that’s not easy to maintain during peak shopping times. Here are some tips to improve mobile performance:

• Keep the site simple; minimize third party downloads and use web services where possible
• Streamline and lighten critical pages in the conversion funnel
• Lighten the number of page elements and use image compression (image weight is a performance killer!)
• Reduce server roundtrips and minimize latency by using a content delivery network

Of course, usability and simplicity is key in mobile. The fewer clicks, the better. Some tips: retailers should always give shoppers the option to check out as a guest – 85% of checkouts on the Demandware platform are made as such. Consider a zip code lookup to minimize required fields, provide at least one alternate payment type, and use big, clear buttons to make the path to purchase crystal clear. Provide an extra layer of confidence by using a padlock icon on checkout buttons.

Another consideration: More than half of shoppers abandon their online shopping cart because they are not ready to purchase; retailers can save the sale by giving shoppers the option to save or email their cart to themselves. One global retailer at a recent Demandware holiday readiness roundtable said they like email my cartbecause it does not require registration and thus, tends to improve stickiness.

There are several ways retailers can leverage geolocation to personalize the mobile shopping experience this holiday:

• Display the closest store and store-specific promotions
• Determine buy online, ship-to-store or pickup in store availability based on proximity to participating store
• Use content slot messaging to highlight ship and payment options for a shoppers’ region
• Target specific products and promotions based on regional preferences or the weather, and prepare for the unexpected; recall the 70-degree Christmas holiday in New England in 2015.

Finally, while retailers might not be taking a mobile-only approach just yet, they should be thinking mobile-first when it comes to development and design. An element that looks great on the full web might render horribly on a phone, creating a bad user experience and giving shoppers an invitation to visit another site.

One roundtable attendee said they invested in several dozen phones to test all elements of their mobile experience, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks in the leadup to holiday.

As the recent Demandware Mobile Shopping Focus report demonstrates, phones represent the biggest disruption to retail since retail went digital. But it’s even more disruptive given the astonishingly short period of time in which it has occurred. The story of this Christmas holiday shopping season will be mobile, mobile, and mobile.

Make sure you are ready.

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Holiday Readiness Part One: All Retailers Want for Christmas…

            

How would you know if you walked over a goldmine, buried beneath your feet?

The truth is, you wouldn’t. But wouldn’t you like some kind of warning, so you could leverage the value of the hidden gems? This kind of proactive information is far more efficient than blindly digging up thousands of square meters on a hunch, and is surely smarter than not noticing the gold at all.

It’s the same with analytics. Analytics tools can show you where the gold lies, but spending hours digging into tons of data is highly inefficient – all the more so if people aren’t actually trained to do an analyst’s work. Still, even non-analysts have to make data-driven decisions. That’s why the future of analytics is proactive. Analytics must proactively alert business teams when they’re sitting on a goldmine, or an ice floe that’s about to crack. Equally as important, analytics must tell business users how to extract the gold.

Your business is sitting on a lot of untapped value. Customers that are ready to buy on a certain day (if only they got an email with the right promotion); products that could drive sales (if only they were in stock) and campaigns that could generate new customers (if only they had been allocated a bigger budget). Don’t leave money on the table. Let your proactive treasure map show you where it is – and then take it.

Even if you know where the value lies, you still need to figure out how to leverage it. Therefore, the future of analytics is not only about proactive insights, but also about proactive action recommendations. If top-selling products are about to run out of stock, proactive analytics will tell you how many to reorder. If high-value customers are about to abandon, proactive analytics will tell you how to reactivate them. If incremental dollars can be made with a certain sales campaign, proactive analytics will tell you how.

Gold bullions are better than nuggets, but you won’t always have an entire bullion at your disposal. Instead, you can regularly collect nuggets by the data-driven actions you take each and every day. Collectively, they can add up to a fortune. The only thing you have to do is make sure that every decision becomes a good decision by enabling the entire team to work in a data-driven mindset – with analytics that proactively tell them what to do to increase business value.

Speaking of enabling the entire team – keep in mind that not everyone is an analyst, so not everybody is able to gain actionable insights from thousands of rows of data.

Data scientists are hard (and expensive) to find, and people without analyst skills are lost when left alone with complex analytics tools. So if you want to enable the entire team to make the best decisions, you have to make out-of-the-box insights and action recommendations available to them.

That said, neither analysts nor non-analysts will make your organization more efficient if they’re forced to dig into masses of data on the premise that they might find valuable information that they might be able to turn into action that might drive business value. So let a machine do the data digging and keep your team focused on achieve actual results.

To scale the massive impact that proactive analytics have on your business when the entire team is involved, you should let machines not only do the data digging for you but also let them trigger and implement immediate action. All you have to do is feed the data into your operative systems like, for example, email marketing, search engine advertising or bid management.

This is why the future of analytics is proactive: organizations have to be data-driven to keep up with fierce competition, and also stand apart from the pack. They can only do that if everyone on the team is enabled to do so. As soon as analytics proactively show everyone what to do to increase business value, then all at once, everyone becomes a gold digger.

To see what proactive analytics can do for your business, check out the new minubo Heartbeat feature.

           

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Against that backdrop, Demandware, a Salesforce company, recently kicked off a series of regional roundtables for retailers hosted by our Retail Practice group, which has informed this, the first in a three-part blog series on holiday readiness.

The first will focus on business considerations relevant to marketers and merchandisers. The second will focus on mobile and the third will be more technical in nature, with tips on how to optimize your infrastructure for holiday.

The Retailer’s Holiday Wish List for 2016:

• Extra shopping days for the season

There will be two extra shopping days during the peak period between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. In 2015, the one extra day drove a 3% increase in orders, meaning that retailers need to prepare and account for additional promotions, inventory and spikes in demand.

• Seasonable appropriate weather

Be prepared for unpredictable weather, and adjust your promotions accordingly and on the fly. Consider the 70-degree weather last December in New England, which didn’t set many holiday shoppers in the mood to buy down coats and other cold-weather gear.

• Top SEO ranking

Build your SEO to capture early bird shoppers, and make your best offers early in the season. In 2015, traffic was higher on the days leading up to Black Friday as shoppers pre-shopped and build shopping carts and wish lists.

• Eager shoppers

Using daily flash sales is a good idea, but consider creating FOMO or “fear of missing out” by emulating what one retailer did – create an advent calendar with the previous day’s sale item grayed out so shoppers could see what they missed.

• High open rates

Don’t underestimate the importance of email subject lines. Experiment with emojis, mystery offers, humor, branded hashtags, a sense of urgency or even refer to a specific dollar amount promotion. Demandware customers have access to Predictive Email to deliver personalized offers. Shoppers will be buried with email offers. Yours must stand out.

• Increased foot traffic

Don’t forget last minute shoppers. Drive them in-store with incentives once free shipping deadlines have passed. Create in-store events for shopping laggards and communicate how store associates can help “save the holiday” by finding the perfect gift.

• Easy gift selection

Use guided selling gift finders, using a series of questions and answers to suggest items. Consider updating the content slot headers and footers with holiday-themed text.

• Higher conversion rates

Offer at least one alternative payment type and always offer shoppers an option to check out as a guest. Need proof for that last point? Eight-five percent of checkouts on the Demandware platform are guest.

• Customer satisfaction

Step up your game with respect to pre and post-sale service. Consider a “holiday services” page with shipping and returns information, and give an opportunity for customers to leave feedback, expressing excitement about their gift or unboxing.

• Shipping accuracy

And speaking of shipping – during holiday, consumers’ expectations are raised exponentially. They want to know precisely when product will be delivered, so retailers should offer real time tracking and SMS alerts.

Holiday shopping season officially kicks off in about four months, better start your shopping now…

           

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Originally popular at the turn of the century, the Pokemon franchise has made a stirring comeback with the free mobile app that allows users to capture Pokemon in the world around them.

I’ve been playing the game since it was launched and if my experience is any indication, Pokemon Go (and other such games likely to follow) will present a golden opportunity for retailers.

Case in point: Last weekend, while visiting friends in New York and looking for a place to eat dinner, our phones weren’t open browsing restaurant reviews or even Google Maps. We were playing Pokemon and chose our dinner spot based on a burger place that doubled as a Pokestop.

For those unfamiliar with the game, a Pokestop can be virtually any landmark, pinpointed by the app’s geolocation feature, where players can collect free items and place a “lure module” which will draw a Pokemon character to the Pokestop location for 30 minutes. This is in turn draws other players to the location and in the process, makes the Pokestop an incredibly popular and valuable location within the game.

We dropped a lure while waiting in line to order, and proceeded to catch Pokemon while waiting for our food. As the Pokemon in the app swarmed to our location, the previously empty restaurant began to fill up, becoming crowded with customers also looking to catch Pokemon while grabbing a bite to eat.

We chose our dinner spot based entirely on that Pokestop, and the restaurant benefitted not only from our business, but from the other players my friends and I helped draw there through the app.

If the food industry can leverage the game to draw traffic, other businesses surely can too. Here are a few suggestions of how retailers might take advantage of Pokemon Go:

• If you’re lucky enough for your business to be near a Pokestop, drop a lure! It’s an easy, practically guaranteed way to drive foot traffic to your store. Lures are in-app purchases that offer 30 minutes of Pokemon for an entirely worthwhile investment of 99 cents. One thing we’ve learned over the last few weeks, if Pokemon are present, people will come.

• Consider developing a Pokemon rewards or incentive program. What if the restaurant I visited offered me a free beverage for placing a lure module? I wouldn’t have hesitated, and based on the customers who followed my friends and I in the store in pursuit of Pokemon, the cost of a drink would have been very worthwhile.

• Even if your business isn’t near a Pokestop and you can’t place lures to drive foot traffic, there are ways drive players (potential shoppers) inside. A sidewalk sign welcoming Pokemon players or offering free bottles of water, for example. Every touchpoint can lead to a transaction and by appealing to players, retailers can create brand loyalty and may even drive sales.

• Support the game’s players by moving relevant merchandise towards the front of the store. If you carry phone chargers, water bottles, sunscreen and other “grab-and-go” merchandise, players who may only be visiting your store for the Pikachu in the men’s section may be driven to make a purchase.

• Stay current on Pokemon Go updates. The game’s developers may offer the option to sponsor Pokestops soon, allowing retailers to easily drive traffic and potentially monetize that  traffic. By staying tuned in, you can cash in on this opportunity as soon as it’s available.

In the summer of Pokemon Go, every interaction with players presents an opportunity for commerce, even if that opening may not be immediately obvious. With the popularity of the characters and by maximizing the mobile, social, augmented reality and geolocation trends, the app has taken off, becoming more popular than Twitter.

Retailers would be wise to implement any of the aforementioned suggestions. It can help drive traffic to your store and help a brand appear cool to the coveted millennial and Gen Z generations.

As someone who falls in that demographic, I’m well on my way to “catching ‘em all,” but are you ready to catch my business?

            

Over the past few years, we’ve included some mobile findings in our quarterly Shopping Index, and provided our share of insights individually to our clients, and on trade show stages. But that wasn’t enough. To help usher in a dramatically better mobile shopping experience, we needed to look deeper into shopper activity on mobile, to the less obvious but no less important elements that define a winning mobile commerce strategy.

We are launching Mobile Shopping Focus to provide retailers with insights into today’s mobile shopper. With these findings, we shine the light on the ups and downs of the current mobile shopping experience.

I encourage you to read the report, and most importantly, use the data inside to help inform and innovate your mobile shopping experience. Here are a few of the key findings:

‘Mobile First’ is here. We now on the path to ‘Mobile-Only’

We’ve come a long way since “Can you hear me now?” and the relative novelty of mobile phones. Mobile devices drive the most traffic to retail sites,and are on pace for much, much more. In fact, by the end of 2017, shoppers will place more orders on phones than any other device. By the end of this year, shoppers will also choose to start more baskets on phones as well.

Mobile conversion still trails, but…

The conversion rate on phones falls well short of that on tablets and computers, but has improved as shoppers have gotten more comfortable shopping on phones and technology has streamlined the mobile shopping experience. With that in mind, we’ve introduced a new metric, Conversion Index, which helps quantify the performance on each device. This help retailers benchmark their efforts and performance. Over the past few years, the Conversion Index on phones (see chart below) has risen dramatically, and is up 70%.

Checkout is a pain point, but…

As mobile basket rate has increased, it has become clear that shoppers who do not ultimately buy on mobile are stalling at the checkout. Notably, this means both sides of checkout. Most glaring is their reluctance to even begin the checkout process, as shoppers are 26% less likely to start a checkout on mobile than other devices.Those who do begin checkout on mobile are also 11% less likely to complete it. There is hope, though. First, the growth of checkout starts is highest on mobile (slightly edging out tablets). More importantly, the winds of change are picking up, with advancements from PayPal and the recent news that Apple Pay is coming to mobile web, shoppers have better tools and a streamlined path to purchase.

For an in-depth analysis of mobile shopping trends, gleaned from 400 million global shoppers, as well as mobile best practices from well-known retailers, download Mobile Shopping Focus.

           

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