Mobile Commerce Minute

Disruption and change were the key themes at the annual "Big Show" - NRF in New York last week. On the news that Target and Sony are closing down all their stores in Canada and the rumours of the demise of Radio Shack, Chuck offers his thoughts on what he witnessed at NRF. He also highlights the thing that no one is talking about to each other - but they are to him.

Talk about skipping forward. ShopX is giving away 1 million beacons for free because they will eventually be commodities anyway. They are also looking at beacons for a different reason as well. As Chuck details in this episode, free beacons doesn’t necessarily mean free forever but this strategy could jump start the real beacon economy.

Shopular, the mobile app company that finds you deals at your favourite stores, released their 2015 Mobile Retail Outlook Survey and it looks good for mobile shopping. Chuck summarizes and highlights the top numbers and offers insight into what retailers will need to do in order to succeed in mobile.

People use their phones in store. A lot of people. People still shop in stores. A lot of people. So what happens when you have a lot of people shopping in stores while using their smartphone? Opportunity. Chuck details a few recent eMarketer reports that paint a picture of the interplay between consumers, stores and smartphones.

When you look at mobile as a very important tool in your sales process you should see endless opportunities and paths to revenue. The question now focuses on where should you begin and what should you avoid. Those questions are answered in this episode. Chuck brings us the 7 ways to drive mobile sales and the 7 ways to kill mobile sales - all from research done by Forrester on behalf of SPS Commerce.

There was a distinctly blue layer over CES this year - as in Bluetooth. What is old is new again and bluetooth is one of those protocols that never really caught on when it arrived but it seems to now have hit its stride. Chuck explains what the importance of the emerging bluetooth ecosystem is on beacons and highlights some of the products he saw while walking the halls of the bluetooth pavilion.

At CES it is easy to overlook the seemingly now low-tech innovations that got us to where we are. Take the smartphone - that thing that over 2 billion people carry with them - how many mentions did it get? Instead, it was wearables and bluetooth and drones and beacons. Perhaps the smartphone is developing a founders complex around all the other technologies getting the limelight. Or perhaps, as Chuck lays it out here, it is now so much a part of what we do and how we do it that its name goes unsaid BECAUSE it is assumed and so important.

It's a wrap. The International CES is done for another year and with it comes Chuck's overview of what he saw and what left a lasting impression. We'll dedicate a few episodes to some of the trends and patterns that emerged from CES in the days ahead but this episode gives us first impressions on the types of products that filled the halls.

The very reason we love mobile is the very reason we should protect our device with a password or some sort of security. Think about it, the phone is the most personal device we own and 50% of us don't lock it down. Do you leave your front door open when you aren't home? Why then would you not put a password on your device? Even those of us that do use some sort of lock on our smartphones, it is often the same one that we use elsewhere - this according to a recent study by Nok Nok Labs and Javelin Strategy & Research. The key results of that study, Smartphones, Tablets and Fraud: When apathy meets security, are summarized here by Chuck. Hey folks, it's time to get your password on...

We spend a lot of time talking about the influence that mobile is having on our decision-making process. It is very hard to quantify because mobile swerves in and out of everything that we do BUT here is a study that gives us a glimpse of where mobile plays. Entitled Holiday Shopping in a Cross-Screen World, it shows us where mobile fits when it comes to researching product, ad impact and recall plus the breakdown of the types of products we all research from our devices. Chuck summarizes in this episode.