New Mobile Retail Initiatives

Mobile provides huge opportunities for retailers. It is great to see that the NRF (National Retail Federation) is looking to encourage mobile services with its member retailers. For more information about the Mobile Retail Initiative, visit www.nrf.com/mobile

Morgan Stanley's Data Dump on Mobile Internet

Morgan Stanley has recently completed a comprehensive report on the Mobile Internet. They have done an impressively exhaustive analysis of various aspects of the market, technologies and vendors. Unlike most of the reports that are done by research firms, you can actually get your hands on much of the information for free. Here is link http://bit.ly/70JtbM to their 92 page summary of the findings. If you have the inclination one can also download a more exhaustive presentation with over 600 slides.

There are some good stats and useful forecasts, especially if you are concocting a business plan for VCs. No doubt these figures will be used to drive many optimistic forecasts for the mobile internet market. Given these projections, one can understand the thinking behind the $275 million paid to Quatro Wireless by Apple or the $600 Google is shelling out for AdMob. Hope this will drive lots more investment in good ideas in the space.

Optimizing Mobile Retail Sites

Gomez Advisers provides their perspective on how retailers need to optimize evaluate the performance of their mobile sites in the recent Mobile Marketer. Gomez is very experienced in the field of analysis of web site performance and relates many of the traditional evaluation criteria to the mobile web. http://bit.ly/589QFt

I agree that these criteria are important. However, the first step is getting retailers to actually create mobile sites that provide value to consumers, engage them and get them to return. Further, for those retailers that actually have mobile web properties, where is the promotion? Do customers know they exist? What is the clear use case for consumers to go to those sites.

Just translating existing web to mobile is not enough. We hear great examples like eBay. Other retailers need to invest the time and energy to find their benefits to consumers. Focusing on page load times and other quantitative measures are only relevant when we know what that information value is to consumers. First focus on making the experience and information useful.