Helping Incorporate Mobile Commerce Into The Retail Endurance Juggling Act

These days, it isn’t enough to have the best retail store in town, the most convenient online shopping site or even the most exciting mobile app — most merchants need all three to compete.

Consumers have more choice than ever before when making a purchase, complicating matters for retailers trying to offer customers the best possible experience by pushing them to juggle multiple digital and real-world storefronts. And no matter how customers choose to make a purchase, most spend time doing research on products via multiple channels, including online, via mobile devices and in-store. For retailers and merchants, that means finding a way to make all the channels customers may visit work together to deliver a unified, consistent and enjoyable experience.

And in 2017, mobile devices have become perhaps the most important of any channel — according to industry research, mobile commerce saw more than $67 billion in sales in 2016, and that figure is expected to climb north of $100 billion in 2017. Even consumers who do make their purchases at physical stores are using mobile devices, with more than three-quarters of consumers reporting using a mobile device in retail stores to find out more information about a product or company before making a final decision about whether to purchase a product.

Jim Barnes, founder and CEO of mPOS and omnichannel software company Enspire Commerce, said making mobile commerce and technology work for merchants can be a tough task. Older legacy systems often used by established retailers can be difficult to update to work with modern technology, and even modern mobile-ready systems can cause merchants issues.

“We see a lot of specialty retailers’ and big box retailers’ pain points,” Barnes told PYMNTS in a recent interview. “And we realized one of the biggest challenges retailers had was around integration, getting all of these different channels to work together.”

Barnes described how he and his team used their experience as mobile and omnichannel consultants to start a software business with the aim of helping both large retailers like Brooks Brothers and PetSmart and smaller specialty retailers use mobile technology to unite their different business channels and deliver a better customer experience.

Finding Tech Harmony

Modern customers are eager for retailers and merchants to offer the latest technology, and that means that merchants are increasingly eager to implement it in their stores.

But even for the most forward-thinking retailers of all sizes, the problems with implementing and integrating a new system can be difficult to deal with.

Smaller specialty stores often struggle to afford or justify an investment of time, money or effort in new sales technology, but Barnes said that even well-known brands can falter when it comes to modern technology.

“You just have a quagmire of different applications to sort through in order just to allow a customer to buy when they want to buy and fill that order,” he said.

Barnes and his team worked to create a solution that would allow merchants to monitor a range of channels and systems from a single mobile device, simplifying the onboarding and adoption process for merchants.

“We have people come to us and say, ‘My problem is that I can’t react in this world of digital transformation because I have this massive amount of applications that are preventing me from moving quickly or being agile,’” he said. “What they need, and what we built, is a platform, not an application, but a platform that can work with any application to get the information out and put it in one easy mobile platform that merchants can monitor and keep track of.”

Integrating Employees As Experience Enhancers 

But helping retailers integrate these new applications and solutions is only half the battle, Barnes said.

Even if merchants are willing and able to open up their systems to new applications or solutions, if the technology does not add value for customers, they will largely ignore it, making that investment a waste. For many merchants, this means needing to train in-store employees to use the technology in exciting and efficient ways. That way, customers are more likely to appreciate the in-store experience.

Barnes said that the company is focused on developing mobile applications that can enhance and amplify the services store associates provide, rather that rendering those employees or services unnecessary. In fact, Barnes noted, the best uses of mPOS technology often allow store associates to do things that technology alone cannot, which helps companies build relationships with customers.

“We never want technology or a mobile device to disenfranchise or diminish the actual sales associate,” he said. “We want them to use it as a way to enable sales and build relationships with customers that come into a store.”

Barnes said that he and his team have been working to use mobile and digital channels to give customers the information or promotions they want when shopping, in real-time. Specifically, Enspire Commerce has engineered mobile microsites targeting individual consumers based on where and how they search for information.

The idea, Barnes explained, is to deliver information on products or even promotional offers or discounts that are designed to increase the odds a consumer makes a purchase in real –time.

“What I really want to do with all of this mobile technology, no matter what exactly it’s doing, is enhance the experience for customers,” he said. “But lots of things have to be working together in the right way to make that happen.”

So when it comes to helping merchants go mobile, it may just take the right platform to make it all work together seamlessly. Or juggling lessons.

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