July 3, 2013
Is it Just Too Difficult to Shop by Mobile Phone?
According to a new survey, 88 percent of those who shop on their smartphone have had negative experiences.
With 71 percent of smartphone owners indicating they shop using their mobile device, the survey by Skava, an e-commerce technology provider, found that smartphone shopping is becoming more common, but users aren’t having so much fun.
When asked about their biggest pain points when shopping on mobile, mobile shoppers responded:
- Retailers’ websites are harder to navigate and use on a mobile device than on a desktop (51 percent);
- Product images are too small to make buying decisions (46 percent);
- Concerns over security (41 percent);
- Checkout process is a pain (26 percent).
Other challenges include concerns over data usage costs, difficulties in adding coupon codes and mobile website speed. Some shoppers believe that products are more expensive on a mobile website, while others have concerns over clicking the wrong buttons when making purchases.
Thirty percent claim they would never return to that particular retailer’s mobile website again after a negative experience. Furthermore, 29 percent of smartphone owners claim it would be six months or more before giving a retailer’s mobile website a second chance, while 33 percent would immediately defect to a competitor and 36 percent would abandon the purchase altogether after a sub-optimal experience.
Harris Interactive conducted the survey of 2,085 U.S. adults online.
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Do you think the survey results regarding consumers’ biggest mobile shopping pain points are accurate? Which ones do you expect will be resolved soon? Which may be toughest to overcome?
Poll
Shopping by mobile phone is definitely a pain in the neck, but I think most consumers realize mobile shopping is an experiment in progress. They’ll all give it another look as the technology improves, which it will do regularly. But, security problems and hacking issues will cause longer lasting resistance.
A consistent theme has emerged, and that is “convenience”. If pain persists, usage will stop. Mobile sites must have huge fonts, minimum clicks and rock-solid security. Also, minimize the flashy, data-intensive animations that typically add no value.
Don’t expect to completely replicate the functionality of your non-mobile site to mobile… at least until technologies (Read: SPEED) improve significantly.
Bottom line, keep mobile as simple as possible and win your customers with that simplicity. There will always be time to treat your satisfied shoppers to flashier sites when they become reliable.
I’m not as concerned with the numbers as much as the trends in those numbers. If you were to look at the same survey over an extended period of time, you would find the numbers are trending to a better experience. While this use of mobile is growing in popularity, the experience will get better. Companies are creating second versions of their websites – mobile versions. The designers and developers are working hard to create a better user experience. Just like anything new, it takes time for a consumer to learn how to use the system.
Most of the areas in this article will be resolved or improved. One thing that will be tough to overcome is the size of the screen. The mobile device is just so big – otherwise it wouldn’t be a mobile device.
All the points are accurate. Data usage costs should come down, but other difficulties are generally tied to “reality.” Perhaps technology will be developed to allow us to shrink down our own size whenever we want to, so we can more easily use the tiny screens and keys. But then we’d have to watch out for large dogs and deep rain puddles.
The silos that exist in most retail organizations between online and bricks-in-mortar inventories and distribution channels contribute to the negative mobile experience. Until retailers tear down the silos and the experience becomes seamless, I think we will continue to see disappointment with the mobile experience. The good news is that we are seeing many retailers moving toward providing a seamless experience (i.e., omni-channel retail). RFID is a major contributor to a retailer’s ability to providing a seamless experience – they must know what they have and where they have it.
This isn’t a choice between the two devices but rather a chance for retailers to really get omni-channel shopping right for their target consumer. For too long, retailers have been describing omni-channel in terms of supply chain. The infancy of omni-channel celebrated things like “buy online, return in store” or the consistent pricing of products across channels — big deals for the IT departments but a collective yawn from the average consumer.
We now see that consumers want an omni-channel shopping experience and they don’t know (or care) about the complexities of delivering a valuable experience from store to website to mobile website, etc.
Small screens do make product presentation more difficult but screens are growing and consumers are switching between devices that will best accommodate their specific need at the time. I also think that the perception that device size is an inhibitor is generationally skewed. Again, the consumer will determine which device best facilitates their current shopping need. It’s up to the retailer to understand the device, product, consumer relationship and create the best experience possible. I’ve watched my 25-year-old son edit a video, play a game, and shop for clothing on his phone. Screen size will not be an inhibitor in the future.
There are a couple of dynamics in play here.
The smaller smartphone screen and keyboard make the process more cumbersome and challenging than a traditional PC-based ecommerce experience, to which it is intuitively compared. And it comes out wanting.
Most retailers’ approaches are to take their ecommerce experience and “mobile optimize” it, which generally means taking the same traditional experience and resizing it to the smaller screen. It’s part of the “if you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail” philosophy. But the mobile experience is one where a change in scale leads to a change in state. And it requires a completely different approach.
While it’s not part of the Skava survey, the increasing use of the smartphone to assist with the in-store buying process is also relevant. Traditional ecommerce does little to enhance that process and, in fact, tends to detract from that experience (and moves the customer within a click of Amazon).
In short, wedging traditional ecommerce into a smartphone doesn’t work. The entire approach needs to rethought from the customer’s perspective.
Todd is right on the money with his comment. Retailers who try to use their mobile properties as another channel for their eCommerce site will likely cause frustration for themselves and their clientele. The real power of mobile for retailers is to find innovative and refreshing ways that mobile scenarios can enable and enhance the overall customer experience. A few retailers, like Tesco, are starting to show how this can be done.
Studies such as this are very helpful because a general problem has been clearly identified and reported objectively by Skava. Getting to the solutions, however, requires a more detailed understanding of specific shopping occasions. Engineering a solution for buying a single item which is purchased infrequently, such as a blender, requires one approach. A different approach may be required to try to capture CPG purchase occasions where shoppers are hoping to buy items from several, or many categories, at a time. That challenge seems truly daunting.
No. The real issues here might be more connected to the availability of connectivity rather than actual mobile shopping. The other concerns lie with the measuring of these “shopping pains” by the authors, and the audience they drew these from.
Those concerns seem reasonable and accurate. The easiest to improve, if not resolve, will most likely be the first and last points. As technology improves and we learn more about how to optimize mobile sites, those experiences will similarly improve. Small product images are a problem inherent to the channel, and although you can find ways to work around it (such as zooming in), replicating a PC experience will not come easily. Most difficult to overcome is security, which is largely an issue of perception and is likely to always be a concern, regardless of the online channel employed.
I think we can all sympathize with these results. Certainly, a quality mobile site is becoming a crucial part of a consistent customer experience. Why have an all singing, all dancing desktop site and a great in-store experience if your customers can’t do their research or purchasing via their smartphone?
One interesting development around this discussion is Google’s recent announcement (on June 11, 2013) that they are changing the ranking of smartphone search results. This, in a nutshell, means that many of the annoying “turn-off” experiences we have with mobile sites may start to trickle away. Think of interstitials (the “please download our app” or “sign up for our newsletter” floating banners), unplayable videos in Flash or other languages, slow-to-respond mobile sites…all of these will be punished by Google’s ranking engine. Only time will tell, but these will be welcomed by the mobile purists and the everyday consumer like you and I.
What’s important, though, for retailers to still consider in the mobile customer experience is “what the customer is doing at that point in time in the customer journey when using their smartphone.” Do they want to complete a full purchase on the device? Or is it just research? A full understanding of how your customers use different devices at different points in the customer journey is crucial to avoid the annoyance of a bad mobile experience.
The biggest problem with mobile devices for retailers is the keyboard interface. Retailers will have to look at solutions that minimize the use of the so-called onscreen keyboard.
Barcode readers, object recognition, speech recognition, geo-location, NFC, and augmented reality are input/outputs that many are seeing being done on the upcoming Google Glasses that actually should be implemented in mobile today.
Retailers should seriously focus on interfaces that does not involve the “onscreen keyboard” to have smoother and increase mobile interaction.
Absolutely, they’re accurate. It’s all about form factor. It’s easier on a tablet because it’s a larger touchscreen interface. And it’s even easier on a desktop computer because you have a mouse to help you click and navigate.
Beyond the screen size (which is already being addressed by manufacturers making “phablets”) I think the easiest challenge to overcome is transaction security—people will become more and more comfortable “securely” shopping on their phones over time. The toughest? Accelerating the checkout process—doing this requires back-end design and payment integration that not all retailers are able to deliver yet.
Navigation has always been the problem with mobile e-commerce. And shoppers are less satisfied than in years past. Increasingly, users expect their mobile experiences to be intuitive and mistake proof.
Fixing the navigation pain points includes:
1. Mobile optimization. E-stores need to follow responsive design or mobile-specific best practices. This means fewer larger images, avoiding pinch/zoom as much as possible, and making click-to-call prominent for frustrated users. Merchants won’t sell products that their shoppers can’t see.
2. Proto-typical navigation. There are lots of cool things you can do with mobile navigation. Many of them you simply shouldn’t. One shortcut for prototypical navigation (i.e., giving users what they’re used to seeing) is to learn from the most popular eCommerce leaders like eBay and Amazon.
3. Orientation. Shoppers need a big fat “you are here.” Because so many online shoppers use search engines to find products, they end up on interior pages. They need breadcrumbs or failsafes like hamburger buttons to find their way back to category pages.
4. Search prominence. For the above reasons, mobile stores need to make search visible and obvious. When there’s less room for navigation, nothing beats free text to help users get to the items they want.
According to one survey, most retail purchases are made through a retailer’s website and not through the mobile apps. Smartphone users prefer to browse the website on the phone rather than download an app which would eat into phone memory and speed.
However, most retailers haven’t designed their websites for mobile user efficiently. They have focused on enhancing the app. Websites need to be form factor aware and platform aware to deliver the best shopping experience. As a shopper, I feel that the survey has accurately captured all of my concerns.
Making the website easy to navigate would be the toughest thing, with complexity of screen size of devices and multiple platform compliance.
The technology around making the smartphone a better shopping device is improving, but the form factor of a smartphone is a limiting factor. I don’t think though the issue is as much trying to get as much “stuff” onto a smartphone as you can onto a PC or tablet screen, as it is making the in store shopping function convenient. Trying to do everything on a phone that you can on a website is a little like saying I should be able to use the trunk of my car for carrying packages, just as well as I could a truck, they are after all both suited for moving stuff.
If I’m in a store and want to buy that product I saw online in a size not on the shelf, I can do that quite nicely on a smartphone in a variety of ways including starting with scanning the barcode and pulling up other sizes, then pressing “purchase.” My digital wallet can make the rest of the purchase simple, (and I’m probably doing this on a well thought through native app, not browsing the web) On the other hand browsing through 200 products to find one I want to buy on my smartphone may never be a high quality experience. I think the trick will be to use the smartphone for what it is suited, and make the overall shopping experience better. That will deal with about half the objections from the survey.
Retailers get into trouble when they think of mobile as another channel, as the above data demonstrates. Instead, think of a mobile as a tool to engage and sell to consumers what, when, and where they want (in-store, by phone, online)—let them shop their way.
I think the survey results are accurate. Entries to the Online Retail Awards this year have proved that there is a long way to go before mobile sites are up to the mark for online retailers and their customers. Great mobile entries were few and far between, with plenty of also-ran sites falling by the wayside. Navigation will improve fast, and the payment process has to improve immediately. Product image size only relates to what a consumer is buying, so is subjective.
But mobile is the future and there are lots of small steps being taken that, when they coalesce, will make for big leaps in consumer enjoyment of mobile shopping and in retailer success. We hope there will be many more mobile entrants come January 1, 2014, when the ORA entries re-open.
Most of the pain areas look right. Was the survey done on mobile shoppers who regularly buy online or does it include mobile shoppers who may not buying online?
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Shopping by mobile phone is definitely a pain in the neck, but I think most consumers realize mobile shopping is an experiment in progress. They’ll all give it another look as the technology improves, which it will do regularly. But, security problems and hacking issues will cause longer lasting resistance.
A consistent theme has emerged, and that is “convenience”. If pain persists, usage will stop. Mobile sites must have huge fonts, minimum clicks and rock-solid security. Also, minimize the flashy, data-intensive animations that typically add no value.
Don’t expect to completely replicate the functionality of your non-mobile site to mobile… at least until technologies (Read: SPEED) improve significantly.
Bottom line, keep mobile as simple as possible and win your customers with that simplicity. There will always be time to treat your satisfied shoppers to flashier sites when they become reliable.
I’m not as concerned with the numbers as much as the trends in those numbers. If you were to look at the same survey over an extended period of time, you would find the numbers are trending to a better experience. While this use of mobile is growing in popularity, the experience will get better. Companies are creating second versions of their websites – mobile versions. The designers and developers are working hard to create a better user experience. Just like anything new, it takes time for a consumer to learn how to use the system.
Most of the areas in this article will be resolved or improved. One thing that will be tough to overcome is the size of the screen. The mobile device is just so big – otherwise it wouldn’t be a mobile device.
All the points are accurate. Data usage costs should come down, but other difficulties are generally tied to “reality.” Perhaps technology will be developed to allow us to shrink down our own size whenever we want to, so we can more easily use the tiny screens and keys. But then we’d have to watch out for large dogs and deep rain puddles.
The silos that exist in most retail organizations between online and bricks-in-mortar inventories and distribution channels contribute to the negative mobile experience. Until retailers tear down the silos and the experience becomes seamless, I think we will continue to see disappointment with the mobile experience. The good news is that we are seeing many retailers moving toward providing a seamless experience (i.e., omni-channel retail). RFID is a major contributor to a retailer’s ability to providing a seamless experience – they must know what they have and where they have it.
This isn’t a choice between the two devices but rather a chance for retailers to really get omni-channel shopping right for their target consumer. For too long, retailers have been describing omni-channel in terms of supply chain. The infancy of omni-channel celebrated things like “buy online, return in store” or the consistent pricing of products across channels — big deals for the IT departments but a collective yawn from the average consumer.
We now see that consumers want an omni-channel shopping experience and they don’t know (or care) about the complexities of delivering a valuable experience from store to website to mobile website, etc.
Small screens do make product presentation more difficult but screens are growing and consumers are switching between devices that will best accommodate their specific need at the time. I also think that the perception that device size is an inhibitor is generationally skewed. Again, the consumer will determine which device best facilitates their current shopping need. It’s up to the retailer to understand the device, product, consumer relationship and create the best experience possible. I’ve watched my 25-year-old son edit a video, play a game, and shop for clothing on his phone. Screen size will not be an inhibitor in the future.
There are a couple of dynamics in play here.
The smaller smartphone screen and keyboard make the process more cumbersome and challenging than a traditional PC-based ecommerce experience, to which it is intuitively compared. And it comes out wanting.
Most retailers’ approaches are to take their ecommerce experience and “mobile optimize” it, which generally means taking the same traditional experience and resizing it to the smaller screen. It’s part of the “if you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail” philosophy. But the mobile experience is one where a change in scale leads to a change in state. And it requires a completely different approach.
While it’s not part of the Skava survey, the increasing use of the smartphone to assist with the in-store buying process is also relevant. Traditional ecommerce does little to enhance that process and, in fact, tends to detract from that experience (and moves the customer within a click of Amazon).
In short, wedging traditional ecommerce into a smartphone doesn’t work. The entire approach needs to rethought from the customer’s perspective.
Todd is right on the money with his comment. Retailers who try to use their mobile properties as another channel for their eCommerce site will likely cause frustration for themselves and their clientele. The real power of mobile for retailers is to find innovative and refreshing ways that mobile scenarios can enable and enhance the overall customer experience. A few retailers, like Tesco, are starting to show how this can be done.
Studies such as this are very helpful because a general problem has been clearly identified and reported objectively by Skava. Getting to the solutions, however, requires a more detailed understanding of specific shopping occasions. Engineering a solution for buying a single item which is purchased infrequently, such as a blender, requires one approach. A different approach may be required to try to capture CPG purchase occasions where shoppers are hoping to buy items from several, or many categories, at a time. That challenge seems truly daunting.
No. The real issues here might be more connected to the availability of connectivity rather than actual mobile shopping. The other concerns lie with the measuring of these “shopping pains” by the authors, and the audience they drew these from.
Those concerns seem reasonable and accurate. The easiest to improve, if not resolve, will most likely be the first and last points. As technology improves and we learn more about how to optimize mobile sites, those experiences will similarly improve. Small product images are a problem inherent to the channel, and although you can find ways to work around it (such as zooming in), replicating a PC experience will not come easily. Most difficult to overcome is security, which is largely an issue of perception and is likely to always be a concern, regardless of the online channel employed.
I think we can all sympathize with these results. Certainly, a quality mobile site is becoming a crucial part of a consistent customer experience. Why have an all singing, all dancing desktop site and a great in-store experience if your customers can’t do their research or purchasing via their smartphone?
One interesting development around this discussion is Google’s recent announcement (on June 11, 2013) that they are changing the ranking of smartphone search results. This, in a nutshell, means that many of the annoying “turn-off” experiences we have with mobile sites may start to trickle away. Think of interstitials (the “please download our app” or “sign up for our newsletter” floating banners), unplayable videos in Flash or other languages, slow-to-respond mobile sites…all of these will be punished by Google’s ranking engine. Only time will tell, but these will be welcomed by the mobile purists and the everyday consumer like you and I.
What’s important, though, for retailers to still consider in the mobile customer experience is “what the customer is doing at that point in time in the customer journey when using their smartphone.” Do they want to complete a full purchase on the device? Or is it just research? A full understanding of how your customers use different devices at different points in the customer journey is crucial to avoid the annoyance of a bad mobile experience.
The biggest problem with mobile devices for retailers is the keyboard interface. Retailers will have to look at solutions that minimize the use of the so-called onscreen keyboard.
Barcode readers, object recognition, speech recognition, geo-location, NFC, and augmented reality are input/outputs that many are seeing being done on the upcoming Google Glasses that actually should be implemented in mobile today.
Retailers should seriously focus on interfaces that does not involve the “onscreen keyboard” to have smoother and increase mobile interaction.
Absolutely, they’re accurate. It’s all about form factor. It’s easier on a tablet because it’s a larger touchscreen interface. And it’s even easier on a desktop computer because you have a mouse to help you click and navigate.
Beyond the screen size (which is already being addressed by manufacturers making “phablets”) I think the easiest challenge to overcome is transaction security—people will become more and more comfortable “securely” shopping on their phones over time. The toughest? Accelerating the checkout process—doing this requires back-end design and payment integration that not all retailers are able to deliver yet.
Navigation has always been the problem with mobile e-commerce. And shoppers are less satisfied than in years past. Increasingly, users expect their mobile experiences to be intuitive and mistake proof.
Fixing the navigation pain points includes:
1. Mobile optimization. E-stores need to follow responsive design or mobile-specific best practices. This means fewer larger images, avoiding pinch/zoom as much as possible, and making click-to-call prominent for frustrated users. Merchants won’t sell products that their shoppers can’t see.
2. Proto-typical navigation. There are lots of cool things you can do with mobile navigation. Many of them you simply shouldn’t. One shortcut for prototypical navigation (i.e., giving users what they’re used to seeing) is to learn from the most popular eCommerce leaders like eBay and Amazon.
3. Orientation. Shoppers need a big fat “you are here.” Because so many online shoppers use search engines to find products, they end up on interior pages. They need breadcrumbs or failsafes like hamburger buttons to find their way back to category pages.
4. Search prominence. For the above reasons, mobile stores need to make search visible and obvious. When there’s less room for navigation, nothing beats free text to help users get to the items they want.
According to one survey, most retail purchases are made through a retailer’s website and not through the mobile apps. Smartphone users prefer to browse the website on the phone rather than download an app which would eat into phone memory and speed.
However, most retailers haven’t designed their websites for mobile user efficiently. They have focused on enhancing the app. Websites need to be form factor aware and platform aware to deliver the best shopping experience. As a shopper, I feel that the survey has accurately captured all of my concerns.
Making the website easy to navigate would be the toughest thing, with complexity of screen size of devices and multiple platform compliance.
The technology around making the smartphone a better shopping device is improving, but the form factor of a smartphone is a limiting factor. I don’t think though the issue is as much trying to get as much “stuff” onto a smartphone as you can onto a PC or tablet screen, as it is making the in store shopping function convenient. Trying to do everything on a phone that you can on a website is a little like saying I should be able to use the trunk of my car for carrying packages, just as well as I could a truck, they are after all both suited for moving stuff.
If I’m in a store and want to buy that product I saw online in a size not on the shelf, I can do that quite nicely on a smartphone in a variety of ways including starting with scanning the barcode and pulling up other sizes, then pressing “purchase.” My digital wallet can make the rest of the purchase simple, (and I’m probably doing this on a well thought through native app, not browsing the web) On the other hand browsing through 200 products to find one I want to buy on my smartphone may never be a high quality experience. I think the trick will be to use the smartphone for what it is suited, and make the overall shopping experience better. That will deal with about half the objections from the survey.
Retailers get into trouble when they think of mobile as another channel, as the above data demonstrates. Instead, think of a mobile as a tool to engage and sell to consumers what, when, and where they want (in-store, by phone, online)—let them shop their way.
I think the survey results are accurate. Entries to the Online Retail Awards this year have proved that there is a long way to go before mobile sites are up to the mark for online retailers and their customers. Great mobile entries were few and far between, with plenty of also-ran sites falling by the wayside. Navigation will improve fast, and the payment process has to improve immediately. Product image size only relates to what a consumer is buying, so is subjective.
But mobile is the future and there are lots of small steps being taken that, when they coalesce, will make for big leaps in consumer enjoyment of mobile shopping and in retailer success. We hope there will be many more mobile entrants come January 1, 2014, when the ORA entries re-open.
Most of the pain areas look right. Was the survey done on mobile shoppers who regularly buy online or does it include mobile shoppers who may not buying online?