Mobile commerce can crush you or make you rich

Mobile commerce interested me in February 2011 as I prepared a talk about e-business. More Amino visitors were using phones and tablets, and I thought about what that would mean for online shops.

Mobile commerce changed how I shopped myself

I explain that I’d bought lots of Christmas presents from my iPhone. Amazon’s app made shopping easy when something occurred to me.

One example was a smoker a friend told me about. While we talked, I found it on my phone, read users’ reviews and bought it.

For me, that was different from having to remember the purchase until I was at the computer again. The impulse and the opportunity to buy were closer together.

Could the customer complete a purchase on a small screen?

I wanted online shop owners to try their own shops on mobile devices. Buttons, menus and payment could be awkward even if the site worked well with a mouse and large screen.

I mention Flash and menus that responded to hovering a mouse over them, among other things. Those were specific technical challenges I saw back then.

An opportunity to make things easier

I thought it was both a threat and an opportunity. If competitors’ shops were awkward on a phone, perhaps an easier experience could make a difference.

We were also experimenting with Amino’s menus and considering different versions for different screens.

Traffic figures and predictions about market shares and lost revenue in the video are my statements from 2011. They aren’t current statistics or documented outcomes of the forecasts.

Also read about a later story about a mobile website.

Historical note: Here I mentioned two public talks in Jutland on 1 March 2011. The original talk links aren’t in the post’s saved text.

Mobile commerce was part of my talk about e-business

I’d just come home from a run when I recorded the video. I was also a little excited for another reason: I’d seen that my YouTube videos had collectively been watched more than 250,000 times. I thought that was pretty good for a little iPhone studio in the Jeep.

The videos were also available as a podcast. I hadn’t checked how many times they’d been heard on iTunes, but guessed it was a similar order of magnitude. My total estimate back then was therefore around 300,000–500,000 views and listens. That wasn’t a count of unique people. In any case, I was a little proud.

But what I wanted to discuss came from preparing my e-business talk in Frederikshavn on 1 March. I was also giving a talk in Esbjerg. One thing that interested me was mobility: iPhone, iPad, Android, small laptops and all the new ways of getting online.

At Amino, the share had already doubled

It wasn’t a shock that people were using those platforms more and more. Even so, I was surprised to see iPhone and iPad together accounting for just over five per cent of visits to Amino. Six months earlier, it had been around 2.5 per cent. So it had doubled in six months, according to the figures I presented in the video.

With other mobile platforms emerging, I expected we might reach around 15–20 per cent mobile visits at Amino at the same time the following year. I also guessed more than half of internet traffic could be mobile in three to five years. Those were my expectations in February 2011, not figures for what actually happened afterwards.

Perhaps you didn’t run an entrepreneur portal and thought: What the hell do Amino’s figures have to do with me? My point was that an online shop or other website also needed to consider the trend. The share might differ, but I thought the development was both a threat and an opportunity.

Could even a determined customer get through?

Start conservatively by protecting the business you already have. Does your shop work on an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or small laptop? If a customer really, really wants to buy something, is it even possible?

In the video, I pointed to specific problems from back then. Flash didn’t work on the Apple devices I discussed. Other solutions could be slow and awkward. A menu that opens when you hover a mouse over it isn’t necessarily easy to use with a finger on an iPad either. Advanced drop-down menus could cause problems.

My first advice was to test your own website and see whether quick changes could make a purchase technically possible. Then you could look at the experience: Were buttons too small? Could communication be simpler? Was something fine on a large screen with a mouse but awkward on a small screen?

At Amino, we were experimenting with more advanced menus ourselves. Some could be seen at Amino Tryk back then. We were considering two versions, one for mobile browsers and one for large screens. People on a Mac or PC shouldn’t get a worse experience because others used phones. Those were the considerations we faced at the time.

I bought a smoker while my friend told me about it

I’d felt the opportunity as a customer too. I’d bought almost all the Christmas presents from my iPhone. Amazon’s app worked fantastically well for me, and I used it on my phone.

A friend told me he’d been fishing for steelhead in Canada and his friend had a Bradley smoker. It sounded fantastic. I thought about my own old smoker and the hassle of lighting it. The solution he described was electric and used briquettes. I love smoked fish and meat, but didn’t want to spend lots of time lighting and tending a fire.

While he was talking, I rather rudely took out my phone and searched Amazon. Around three minutes later, I’d found the Bradley model with the best user reviews and bought it along with two large packs of briquettes.

Two days later, it was by my carport. I’d seasoned it the day before the video and was looking forward to using it. For me, it was a new way to shop. I didn’t need to save the thought until I got home to the computer, by which time I might have forgotten.

The impulse could become a purchase straight away

I imagined it could change the importance of adverts you encounter out in the world. A commuter could sit on a bus, see an advert and immediately remember something they needed to buy. I compared it with sweets by the supermarket till: Perhaps other goods online could now become impulse purchases in the same way.

I didn’t know exactly what it would mean for an online shop’s layout. I honestly said so. But I thought it would matter a great deal when the phone brought the opportunity to buy closer to the impulse.

I gave a sharp warning: In my estimate back then, a shop that didn’t support mobile browsers could lose 25–50 per cent of its revenue over the next three years for that reason alone. That was my forecast in the video, not a documented result or a calculation applying to every online shop.

Make buying easy before your competitors do

The opportunity was that competitors faced the same challenge. If you optimised quickly, perhaps you could gain something while others hesitated.

I wasn’t saying every little shop should build an iPhone app. Who would download an app just to buy from your shop? I suggested a mobile version of the website that worked properly: Perhaps less text, images adapted to small screens and a simpler path through the purchase. Also read E-pusher about my experiences of online selling.

Payment needed to be easier too. I mentioned one-click payment or at least large, usable fields where customers entered their card number. Those were examples of thinking mobile rather than just showing the big website on a small screen.

Of course, that could be annoying. You’d just thought you had things under control, and then I came along saying you needed to invest even more time, money and thought in the business. But if you liked new things, I also saw an opportunity to knock some established players off their perch before they got their act together. That was the opportunity I wanted you to consider.

Best wishes, Martin