Mobile Technology Leads to Better Customer Experience
Motorola Solutions Survey shows 67% of shoppers agree emerging in-store technologies heighten overall satisfaction.
The rising availability of shopping-assisted options across all shopping channels has raised customer service expectations for shoppers and retail associates. According to the survey, more than eight in 10 (83.3%) surveyed retail associates and managers believe that shoppers can easily find a better deal so customer service is more important than ever. From a shopper perspective, 33% of shopping trips ended with shoppers leaving before satisfying their intent to purchase, costing an average of $125 per trip. Of those lost opportunities, more than 73% did not complete their purchases with the original retailer.
While shopper activity and spend remains higher in-store than online, retailers need to continue to address the needs of the omni-channel shopper. Online purchases swelled by more than 18% compared to 2010 and 63% of surveyed shoppers with smartphones downloaded some type of shopping application.
Increasing online spend has created variances in satisfaction between offline and online experiences – almost 41% of shoppers were not satisfied with the ability to receive in-stock status in-store compared to 20% online. Approximately 27% of shoppers were not satisfied with the ease of finding correct prices in-store versus approximately 14% online; and 42% of shoppers were not satisfied with the check-out process in-store compared to 15% online. Online shoppers cited a much higher dissatisfaction rate (41% compared to 25%) for the return/exchange process, providing a significant advantage for in-store retailers…Continue reading at CSD
Say No to the Stop Online Piracy Act
by JEFFREY ZELDMAN via Alistapart.com
United States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it.
We at ALA are not alone in our opposition to SOPA. Other opponents of the bill now before the U.S. House of Representatives include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Yahoo!, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Tumblr, Etsy, Reddit, Techdirt, Wikimedia Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The bill has its supporters, too, including Hollywood, media firms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and their lobbyists, who have spent over $91 million to push this new law through.
Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) brought SOPA to the U.S. House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. The bill expands the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.
Behind the law
On its surface, fighting piracy sounds like a good thing, especially if you’ve worked hard on a book, album, font, video, or other product and discovered it being illegally distributed free of charge on a shady website or server beyond the reach of U.S. law.
Speaking personally, every for-sale creative product I’ve helped develop in the past two decades has reached appreciative paying customers through authorized sales channels, from tiny Paypal-powered sites to mighty Amazon and chain stores. But pirated copies have also been readily available on law-flaunting websites, and there are always people who will download free stuff even when they know it’s wrong. I always think people who steal stuff weren’t my customers anyway, but not everyone can take that point of view, and it’s reasonable to wish there was some way to stop the illegal distribution of content.
Wishes are one thing, laws are another. If there is a way to stop piracy (and I think we’d have more luck legislating an end to adultery or overeating), SOPA is not it… Continue reading
Holiday Retailing Frenzy: How IBM Spots the Trends
by Steve Hamm for A Smarter Planet
When it comes to mobile shopping this holiday season, there will be no place for the makers of smartphones and tablet computers to hide. Analysts will be able to detect not just the brand of the device from which a consumer forays to retailing Web sites; they’ll know what model each shopper is using.
This bit of intelligence comes from John Squire, chief strategy officer–smarter commerce, for IBM. Squire is the maestro behind the annual IBM Coremetrics Benchmark campaign–which monitors shopping activities on more than 500 US retailing Web sites and lesser numbers of sites in other countries. Each year, Squire and his team issue a series of updates during the crucial Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days. And, this year, the data will be made public in rapid-fire mode. If you have a large appetite for online retailing data, check in frequently at #holidayretail on Twitter.
Mobile shopping is expected to be hot this season. Squire expects about 12% to 15% of transactions on retailing sites to come from mobile devices, up from 4.5% during last year’s holiday shopping season. “We can detect exactly what device they’re using–the exact device,” he says. “That information can help retailers decide how to invest in enhancing the mobile shopping experience.”…
