More shoppers use smartphones to study, find, buy

Jayne O'Donnell

Sharon Bloom regularly receives text-messaged photos of clothes and products her daughters want her to look for while she's shopping. When she sees an item she likes, she pulls out her Internet-enabled LG Dare phone and sends her two girls pictures. Her phone has helped her find coupons, store locations and restaurants.

This holiday shopping season, retailers are trying to capitalize on the still niche, but poised to boom, market of mobile shoppers such as the Blooms.

Some 19% of Americans will use their mobile devices for shopping this holiday season, according to a Deloitte survey. The number is twice as high for young consumers: 39% of those 18 to 29 say they'll use their phones to find store locations, obtain coupons and sales information and research products and prices. One-quarter of all who plan to use their phones to shop say they will make purchases on the devices.

The mobile shopping market is small, even if the sales numbers seem impressive at first blush: $750 million. But that represents about half of 1% of online sales, and is a pittance in the larger $2.3 trillion retail industry.

But the rush to capture the Blooms and others is on, with retailers offering mobile shopping sites and applications so people can do their holiday shopping on the run.

The trade publication Internet Retailer reported this month that 112 retailers have m-commerce sites and/or apps, and several have more than one.

Toys R Us and Walgreens added mobile sites this week. Sears, which also owns Kmart, was one of the first major U.S. retailers to offer a mobile site, in November of last year. American Eagle added a mobile site in September, while Victoria's Secret recently upgraded its site to allow mobile purchases.

Given the pandemonium that is Black Friday, being able to use mobile devices to do price comparisons, check availability and simply browse other bargains can be invaluable. Stores offer so-called door-buster deals to lure people in, knowing they'll buy more. Many such discounts are advertised in advance, letting shoppers do price comparisons from home PCs. But many deals aren't promoted ahead of time, and other products that aren't deals are strategically placed around stores. Browsing the Web from the sales floor for product and price comparisons can save time and money.

The pocket-size computing power of Internet-enabled smartphones, which often also have microphones, cameras, and motion and location sensors, allow consumers to "interact with the world wherever we are, whatever we're doing," says Nita Rollins, a futurist with the digital marketing agency Resource Interactive.

"The majority of American consumers will be mobile device-centric in a few years," Rollins says. "Now that it's technologically feasible, possessing such power literally in the palm of our hands is quite irresistible."

Designed for use on small devices

Mobile shopping sites typically offer fewer features than regular websites but are sized for small screens and are more easily navigable. Some, such as Best Buy's, allow consumers to zoom right to checkout on the mobile site, while others, including Wal-Mart's and Target's, direct users back to their regular sites for the final purchase.

If you try to access a regular website from a phone, "depending on the device, the experience ranges from awkward to not able," says Jason Taylor, vice president of mobile products for Usablenet, which developed several retailers' mobile sites. "Most of the time, you would be not able to do it."

Along with mobile sites, there are also thousands of applications, or apps, often for iPhones but increasingly for any Internet-enabled smartphone, which make mobile shopping easier.

The price and product comparison site PriceGrabber.com, which has had a mobile site since 2004, is adding an iPhone app soon with a landscape format that makes it easier to view products. The existing mobile site, which is "not very sexy or exciting," already gets about 45,000 hits a day, says PriceGrabber CEO Laura Conrad.

"It puts the desktop and the Internet in people's hands," Conrad. "People want to do their shopping when they want to do it."

Some of the latest in mobile retail:

Best Buy. The electronics retailer has had a mobile site since June; it became fully functioning for purchases at the end of September. Michele Azar, Best Buy's vice president of emerging channels, says even though the retailer thought it important for customers to be able to buy easily on their devices, she says that wasn't the driving force behind the move to mobile.

"When customers are mobile, they expect to shop, learn and buy," says Azar.

Toys R Us. The toy store chain added a mobile site this week. Greg Ahearn, senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce, says it's designed so consumers can quickly find stores, get "mom ratings" and product descriptions, and make purchases.

"Mobile technology use is growing among all age ranges," says Ahearn. " Some youngsters have their own phones and are looking things up, showing them to Mom and Dad and putting the items on their holiday wish lists."

EBay. EBay's mobile website attracts 1 million visitors a day, the company says. EBay expects its mobile commerce – which includes a new iPhone deals app, as of this week – to quadruple in 2010, and says it will do $500 million in sales this year, or two-thirds of all mobile sales.

"It's quite possible more people this year will use mobile commerce through eBay and avoid the stores altogether," says Steve Yankovich, eBay's vice president of business solutions and mobile.

Heavy influence

Resource Interactive studied the use of mobile technology this year as part of a larger look at the digital behaviors of mothers and their at-home teenagers. While the mothers remain the "chief purchasing officers," Rollins says the children were the "chief influencing officers" and used the Internet and often their mobile devices to influence the brands and products their families bought.

Jackie Milsom, 43, and her 14-year-old daughter, Alex, were part of the study. When the two had 45 minutes to kill before a soccer game several months ago, they used Mom's smartphone to find a Vera Bradley purse that Alex wanted, locate a store near them that had it and get directions to the store. Then they drove to buy it. It won't be long before Milsom makes such purchases right on her phone.

"I still have much greater comfort level with my PC, but if I came to find (buying) was quick and efficient on my phone, I most definitely would do that," says Milsom. "I'm on the road a lot."

To facilitate the way young shoppers use their phones as tools of influence, Resource Interactive developed a prototype app that would allow teens to e-mail their parents photos from retail websites and get theirs and others' opinions. If the parents approved, at the click of a button they could authorize the teens to buy the product using an alternative payment site such as BillMyParents.com.

Bloom, 52, has had her smartphone for about a year. She's ready to use it to search the Web for product and price comparisons but remains concerned about security when it comes to purchases.

Usablenet's Taylor says using a mobile Web browser for a purchase is "the same as using a Web browser on a computer." Users should look for the same "lock" icon indicating a "secure connection" that they see when using a Web browser on a regular website, he says.

Bloom says her daughters may lobby her with photos from websites, but she's still not ready to click to purchase.

"I'm not comfortable with sending personal financial information on my phone yet, but I'm sure I will be in a year or two," says Bloom of Owings Mills, Md. "It's sort of like when people first started shopping on the Internet. It took a little while to be comfortable with the safety aspects."