The gap between growing mobile usage and shopping cart conversions has been a thorn in the side of the eCommerce community for years.
To help solve this issue for ecommerce businesses across the board, a community-sourced research initiative called the Mobile Optimization Initiative has been established with the goal to identify better mobile commerce experiences through collaborative experimentation and insight sharing. This Initiative is a community of merchants, system integrators (SIs), and technology companies coming together for a common cause.
To verify and understand how its findings may impact the greater eCommerce world, Forrester Research has produced a study called the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) that examines the potential ROI of strategically shifting critical ecommerce elements, including customer experience, checkout processes and more. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with community initiative, Forrester interviewed four merchants and their system integrators to identify outcomes and measurable results.
In order to ensure relevant findings, Forrester set forth a methodology that ensured uniformity in the experiment. Merchants were all assessed to confirm a deep understanding of current practices and what areas of mobile optimization most needed to be addressed. The participants also engaged in a series of customer experience exercises, optimization and checkout enhancement strategies. The outcome of these experiments were quantified by Forrester as follows:
Note the following risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the interviewed merchants.
a) Identified new algorithms minimized traffic directed to failing tests, avoiding the indirect cost of lost revenues, as much as $295K per year.
b) The initiative identified that certain professional services and tool fees were no longer necessary, securing an additional average savings of $18K annually.
We have asked one of the Mobile Optimization Initiative founders, Dan Leberman, VP of Partners and Marketplaces of PayPal, a few questions to better understand the application of communities to mobile e-commerce.
Q. How can leveraging the power of a community help mobile eCommerce?
PayPal: Converting mobile shoppers into mobile buyers has been a focus and strength for PayPal for the past 10+ years. With more than 286M active consumers and merchants using PayPal, we are in a unique position to understand the major, minor and nuanced type of changes that help mobile shoppers actually complete their purchase.
The community of businesses engaged in this Mobile Optimization Initiative is now beginning to achieve the same gains in mobile checkout as their big-retail competitors. As part of the community, smaller merchants benefit from the aggregated data and conversion analytics of over 200 merchants of various sizes, supplemented by the usability expertise of more than 35 system integrators. This initiative should help enable thousands of improved shopping and purchase experiences across the members of this independent community.
Q. How do merchants benefit from these experiments?
PayPal: Merchants will sell more products to more customers. Potential customers that would merely browse products will become purchasers, and those that purchase will purchase more and more frequently. Benefits will accrue in part because of experiential improvements to streamline mobile checkout. Turning shoppers into buyers is a combination of improving the checkout experience itself but also allowing the shopper to easily complete their purchase while shopping and bypass the full checkout flow altogether.
Q. How do you expect mobile eCommerce to change in the coming years?
PayPal: Of course, global adoption of smart phones and faster data connections will continue to accelerate mobile eCommerce growth rates far past online-desktop and brick-and-mortar in well-developed markets, while also opening up entirely new markets where mobile will leapfrog desktop. Additionally, shoppers all over the globe are rapidly increasing in their “comfort” of completing larger and larger purchases via mobile. We see rapid increases in very high-priced items (including houses and cars!) completed from mobile devices, in addition to buying on mobile more frequently. Finally, by partnering with companies like PayPal and optimizing data across shopping experiences (such as a business’s native app, social media feeds, specialized marketplace apps), businesses can optimize a customer’s shopping experience which will drive repeat purchases and more loyal customers.
Media ContactCompany Name: Mobile Optimization InitiativeContact Person: Dan Leberman, VP of Partners and Marketplaces of PayPal, MOIEmail: Send EmailPhone: 866.251.43355Country: United StatesWebsite: https://www.mobileoptimized.org/
