Retail Has Gone Mobile, Have You?

In case you haven’t noticed, the retail industry is shifting its focus to mobile. Whether it’s the flash sale online shopping during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or just a regular day in a brick-and-mortar store, customers are looking for a mobile experience—and a great one, at that.

The mobile universe has a lot of untapped potential for retail and travel industries beyond the app/mobile site browsing and buying. Buyers are less interested in interacting with your sales associates, however they also don’t want to wait the typical five-to-seven business days for their purchase to be delivered. Hence, “in-person mobile” is now at the epicenter of retail.

The Concept

The blending of the mobile experience with its brick-and-mortar counterpart is one way businesses are attempting to relieve common pain points and create the ultimate customer experience. The result: eliminating the need to wait in line to make a purchase without compromising the instant satisfaction of buying in-store.

The Biggest Trends

Product lookup

One way to seamlessly blend your mobile and in-store shopping experience is to offer product lookup on your website. This allows customers to search for exactly what they want in an efficient, convenient manner where ever they are. They are able to see if a store near their location is carrying that specific product in stock, enabling an in-store experience that is free of frustration and will reinforce their loyalty to your brand.

Click-and-collect

Beyond the basic ability to search your in-store inventory online for a specific product, customers also turn to completing entire transactions from selection to payment on your mobile site, while opting to pick up their purchases at your store.

Otherwise known as “click-and-collect,” this trend is becoming a more common retail practice at stores like Zara, Nordstrom, and Staples, which have already implemented marketing campaigns around it. This allows customers to expedite the entire buying process, from browsing on the go, to receiving their items immediately upon entering the store.

In-store mobile devices

More retailers are also turning to in-store mobile devices to run their point of sales systems. Tablets that run POS software and use accessories like Square to complete credit card transactions are rapidly replacing cash registers. This gives the cashiers the ability to complete credit card transactions from any location within the store, ultimately downsizing the line to cash-only customers, and enhancing overall efficiency.

Despite the vast improvement an in-store mobile device can have on the productivity of your sales associates, it also leaves your business the most vulnerable to performance issues. For example, if a sales associate takes the mobile POS device to the line and announces that he can take people who have decided to pay with a credit out of line to complete their purchase faster, that initially will please customers. However, if that mobile POS device begins to experience latency that drastically slows down the entire checkout process, those customers will probably walk away feeling frustrated and less likely to return to your store.

For this reason, on-premise monitoring is crucial to your successful blending of your in-store and mobile shopping experience. Catchpoint OnPrem Agents allow you to use synthetic monitoring for all of your on-site digital systems and infrastructures, so you can deliver a seamless, exceptional experience to all of your customers.