Are You mCommerce Ready?

We’ve all seen them. Dreary-eyed shoppers camping out in front of big-box stores for days on end so they can score a $100 flatscreen, if they don’t first get trampled armies of moms in search for Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls.

We don’t get Black Friday. We honestly don’t. Here at Appstem, we’re big Cyber Monday guys. We like to do our shopping online, have our packages delivered for us while we sip little drinks with umbrellas in them, our feet up on decorative pillows. That’s how we like to shop. Looking at the online shopping numbers this year, it seems a lot of you agree.

Forbes has already proclaimed this year’s Black Friday to be the biggest shopping day in eCommerce history, with online sales up more than 20 percent over Black Friday 2013. Keep in mind that numbers overall were down 11 percent when you account for brick and mortar retails sales, says the New York Times. Finally, TechCrunch is reporting that 47 percent of all online sales came from mobile.

What’s all this mean for the mobile business? Cousin, business is a booming.

Mobile commerce, known in the hip mobile development crowd as mCommerce, is doing to eCommerce what eCommerce did to retail commerce in the last few years: taking a big piece of that delicious commerce pie. And the answer to your other question is yes, there is such a thing as the hip mobile development crowd. We wear only the trendiest of ironic T-shirts.

Of course we use our phones and tablets like we did our laptops a few years ago. But what makes mobile special? We’re working with some of the biggest retailers in the space to develop the next generation of mCommerce apps that are not only optimized to fit your screen, but a shopping experience optimized for the mobile consumer.

We’ve already seen some trailblazers like Gilt and Amazon come at the problem from different sides. Gilt offers a few luxury items at incredible prices, but available only for a very limited time. The shopping experience becomes more of a game. Meanwhile, Amazon’s mobile site does a great job of offering recommendations based on your past purchases, making discovery of items you’re interested in a cinch.

Now we’re seeing a new generation of virtual storefronts of all kinds fill local shopping niches as well. Sprig, a virtual restaurant created by the former chef of Google, cooks up a handful of healthy items everyday in San Francisco. Place your order on the way home from dinner and your food will be there waiting, tip, delivery fee already folded into the price.

Whether your local, global, big or small, mCommerce will help your customers get what they want, when they want. And using bar code scanners and GPS and photo recognition and all the things a phone can do that a laptop can’t, we are only now scratching the surface of what mobile apps can do for commerce.