Mobility is a major power player in retail. Don’t believe me? Here are some cool stats.
- In March 2012, more than 40 million Americans visited Amazon via their tablet or smartphone (Mashable).
- According to a Deloitte study, smartphones will influence 5.1% of annual retail stores sales or approximately $159 billion in 2012 (Financial Channel).
- Mobile users tend to be wealthier, as 38% of tablet owners make more than $100k per year (Mashable).
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that retailers are scrambling to develop a mobile presence, whether it is through a shopping-enabled mobile app, an optimized mobile website or a simple text message campaign that can target both smartphone and non-smartphone users.
First, let’s discuss the snazzy, shopping-enabled mobile app that allows your customers to make purchases anywhere, anytime. What features must a retailer’s mobile app include to make it user-friendly and effective?
- It must be able to store a shopper’s credit card info for quick checkout.
- It needs to store a shopper’s shipping info and loyalty credentials to keep track of rewards.
- It must store gift card credit so the shopper doesn’t need to carry another physical card in his/her wallet.
- A retail app needs to store coupons and deals to keep a shopper engaged with promotions.
- It needs to store receipts for a customer to keep track of his/her past purchases.
- Returns/exchanges must also be stored, so a shopper can track of when he/she has been credited for a return or when an exchanged piece of merchandise is on its way.
As you can see, developing a mobile app for retailers is not easy, but SAP Sybase’s mCommerce is a solution that encompasses all six components of a consumer facing smartphone. Essentially, mCommerce functions as a mobile wallet; building your application with mCommerce takes care of all the payment, promotion and loyalty headaches involved in creating a mobile app.
Alright, but what if you are launching a campaign that needs to deliver a special deal to a customer at specific time for maximum effectiveness? This is where SAP Precision Retailing with HANA (yes, her!) and mobile comes into play. Retailers collect an immense about of consumer and purchase behavior data (Big Data), which can be stored in a HANA-supported database. SAP Precision Retailing can mine data from the HANA-database for instant insights about your customers (who are they, what and when do they buy), and design customized deals for each customer. These deals can then be delivered to your customer through his/her mobile device in real-time either through text message or through a mobile app.
An illustration: From info stored in the HANA-database, a grocer knows Mrs. Brambles goes shopping for milk, eggs and bread every Monday after work. SAP Precision Retailing takes the data and turns it into an effective deal that gives Mrs. Brambles $2 off her purchase if she will upgrade to more profitable items, or add additional items to her purchase. SAP’s mobile solution delivers this coupon to Mrs. Brambles iPhone at 5:00 pm, right before she gets off work. She sees the coupon, goes to the grocery store, purchases those items and redeems the deal.
If you’re looking for mobile way to influence your customers, SAP Sybase can help. To learn more about our mobile solutions, check out the link below:
http://www.sybase.com/mobilize
