Retailers have yet to truly connect with mobile shoppers - traditional retail missing another trick?

An article by Samanta Edwards over at The Wallblog examines new research on mobile-shopper optimisation (Window on Connected Shoppers - a free 20 page report on converting connected shoppers into buyers).

With one in three of the 30% of smartphone owners that have used their smartphone to shop in the last month, only one in ten of them regularly use apps as part of the purchase process – suggesting that retailers are failing to provide the right content.

In fact, according to the research, in-store smartphone users utilised their devices for:

• sharing ideas (47%)
• comparing prices (29%)
• product information (20%)
• sharing photos, taking pictures as a reminder, store location and browsing (with no intention to purchase) were all cited by 17% of respondents

As always, the problem is not that most retailers are missing the mobile trick, but that a select few (Apple, Schuh) are setting and making new standards in customer-connection work, and have to grow at the expense of old-fashioned retail competition, especially in the case of in-store mobile purchasing...

In other words, these physical retailers have managed to get live mobile-consumers into their stores, and are failing to see that online completion of the mobile journey is still a retail sale....