When implementing mobility in retail, you either innovate or face extinction. The innovations enabling mobility in retail have considerably reduced the visits a consumer makes to the conventional brick & mortar stores, thereby increasing the retailer’s emphasis on strengthening their mobility strategy. Though many shoppers still look forward to buying a product only after touching, seeing, and trying, today’s innovations in mobility are changing the way the shopping experience is being perceived.

Online retail sales continue to boom and are projected to cross $ 250 billion by 2014, accounting for 8% of all U.S. retail sales. Most of these online sales are not happening from desktops or laptops but from smartphones & tablets. This trend will continue to increase in the coming years.

The key reason why mobility has been so successful for retailers is “Convenience”. Leveraging mobility, consumers can buy whatever they want to, whenever they want to, wherever they want to, without facing any hassles searching for the item in the store. This is now an old story for promoting mobility in retail. The new age story is the “Experience”. The mobile shopping experience now creates an entirely new experience for consumers.

Consumers use mobile for searching, reviewing, comparing, and buying products. Retailers can and must leverage these transaction points to meaningfully interact with their consumers.

Retailers are leveraging mobility to influence sales via geo-fencing, driving consumers to their stores, pushing promotional materials to devices, analyzing to understand shopping trends, and adding personalization to their products based on these trends.

Popular mobile applications available on app stores across platforms include: Browsing Products/Services Accessing Push content Accessing & Building Shopping List Viewing Demonstrations/Videos Posting Reviews Locating Stores Scanning Bar Codes Viewing Product Catalogs Redeeming Mobile Coupons Placing Orders Tracking Delivery Receiving Alerts & Notifications related to products, offers etc

Retailers are building customer loyalty by outsourcing application development to enhance the customer shopping experience, both in-store and out. Though mobility is being accepted and implemented by retailers, there is still ample room for enhancing customer service.Some of the challenges that retailers face today are:

• Open Standards
  Use open standards and make it possible to build a standard API that developers can use to build interoperable, scalable, and cost-effective applications.

• Platform Agnostic
  The mobile initiatives must have wider acceptability across multiple and popular mobile platforms.

• Rich Consumer Experience
  Build a richer, more enjoyable, more efficient, and more relevant personalized shopping experience.

• Social Shopping
  Leverage social aspects of buying behavior to make shopping recommendations.

• Change in Retail Environment
  Changes required in existing retail environments to cater to the above requirements.

Until now we have discussed mobility in retail from the consumer’s perspective, the one which is more visible and available. But there is another perspective to enabling mobility in retail which is empowering the employees, staff, and field agents of a retail organization to support the customers in an efficient manner.

Today, organizations are taking steps to ensure their staff is also enabled with devices and have access to relevant information on the go. A probable use case could be if a floor assistant at the store wants to find out if a specific item is available in inventory or not, and if it is, what time it’s getting replenished at the store. He/She can also trigger an alert to ensure the replenishment happens before a customer continues searching and leaves without buying the product. All large retailers have deployed solutions to ensure triggers are launched as soon as a particular item quantity goes below its specified value, which ensures the replenishment is done in time.

Having access to real-time information not only enhances the customer experience but also builds customer loyalty.

Looking at mobility from the perspective of a retail organization, the following are key advantages of its implementation:

• Mobility makes the solution, products, and services being offered by the retail organization “Personal”

• The access to information and services is “Immediate”

• Last but not the least, it is “cost less” - not from the implementation perspective but from a consumer’s perspective who is always carrying a smartphone and has access to additional information, offers, coupons, etc.

In other words, these are also the key reasons behind mobility becoming a need of the hour for a retail environment.