If you think it has been hard for Jacksonville’s small,
local retailers to compete with the big chains, thanks to mobile marketing, the
picture has become bleaker. And in some cases, m-commerce is presenting a
problem for the big retailers, too.
Internet Retailer magazine ran a series of articles that
details how consumers are now going to brick and mortar stores to view products
and compare prices, but are eventually making their purchases online with their
smartphones.
Actually 29% of consumers who use smartphones for product
research while in a retail store buy online, according to data research from
ClickIQ.
Not only does this create a big disadvantage for small
retailers, but the large retailers are also taking a major hit. For example,
the ClickIQ study showed the most frequently used retail store customers
visited for product research was Best Buy at 36%. They were able to retain 35%
of the researchers who ended up buying at the store with another 14% who bought
at BestBuy.com.
But it starts to drop from there, with Wal-Mart experiencing
30% researchers with 26% purchasing at the store and 10% buying at Walmart.com.
Target was third with 29% researchers, 29% in-store purchasers and 8% buying at
Target.com.
Research data revealed that the reasons customers purchased
online was mainly due to price at 67%, followed by availability of product at
14%, product features at 8%, and free shipping at 7%.
ClickIQ also identified profiles of consumers using
smartphones. The research found…
- 51%
of mobile comparison shoppers who research in-store and buy online are between
ages of 18 – 39 and 55% are male;
- 26%
between ages of 30 – 39 and 25% between the ages of 18 – 29 have recently used
a mobile device to research a product while in a store;
- The
numbers drop with age for those researching in a store with 12% between ages of
40 – 49; 6% between ages of 50 – 59; and 2% over the age of 60.
One major retailer trying to break this trend is Walgreens.
According to Internet Retailer, Walgreens is using mobile/social shopping
service technology such as foursquare and Facebook Places to greet customers on their smartphones as they walk into the store. The Walgreens apps
offer customers onscreen product recommendations, promotions and special price
points available at that specific location.
But there are other clouds looming online that will be an
additional threat to local retail businesses. That’s the online giants
Amazon.com and eBay.
Of the 97 million U.S. adults who owned a smartphone running
Apple iOS, an Android or a BlackBerry operating system, 45.4% visited
Amazon.com’s m-commerce site or used the e-retailers’apps in March, according
to the Mobile Metrix 2.0 report from the web and mobile measurement firm
comScore Inc.
eBay Inc. followed with 28% of smartphone users visiting the
m-commerce site or using eBay’s apps.
For the top 15 Internet destinations measured by comScore,
81.5% of visitors’ time was spent on apps while 18.5% was spent on sites.
According to comScore, the top 15 mobile destinations
are (in order of number of unique visitors)...
Google, Inc.
Facebook
Yahoo sites
Amazon.com
Wikimedia Foundation sites
Apple, Inc.
Cooliris
AOL Inc.
eBay Inc.
Zynga
Twitter
Rovio (Angry Birds)
The Weather Channel
Microsoft sites
ESPN
For more information, go to the April and June issues of
Internet Retailer magazine and look for the articles authored by bill@verticalwebmedia.com.
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