Mobile Commerce is Here To Stay

Just a quick follow-up to that post about the big mobile commerce lie everyone’s telling right now. eMarketer conducted an interview with Craig Wigginton, vice-chairman and head of Deloitte & Touche’s telecom sector practice who noted that Millennials have an,

“…addicted-to-connectivity obsession or device obsession. Twenty-four percent of the millennials check their smartphone immediately upon waking, and that was excluding the alarm feature. That jumps to 52% within 5 minutes of waking. Almost half of the millennials—45%—check it more than 200 times a day.”

I first highlighted this interview in this past week’s e-commerce link digest and cited it as further evidence of how short-sighted any mobile commerce backlash is right now.

To be blunt, mobile commerce is still in its very early days. Despite the rapid growth of mobile, smartphone adoption is an extremely recent development. But these early days mirror almost precisely the pattern we saw when e-commerce first came on the scene in the mid-1990’s.

Now, is it possible we’re in the middle of a bubble and that the whole market could come crashing down again as it did in 2001-2002? Of course it’s possible. But I’m not talking about market caps or valuations or anything related to the financial side of the equation.

I’m talking instead about how your customers engage with these channels. Even after the “dot-bomb crash” of the early Naughties (i.e., 2000-2002), loads of major players emerged that continue to shape your customers’ behavior, including Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Priceline, Expedia, Match.com, Craigslist, and on and on and on. Sure, some have had their ups and downs. But have customers continued to “log-on” when they’re ready to browse and shop and buy? Hells, yeah.

Longtime readers will note I make very few predictions about specific companies. As that great philospoher Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” And the more specific you try to be, the tougher those predictions get. For isntance, I can’t tell you if Android or iOS or Windows Phone or Blackberry will represent your customers’ device of choice down the road — though, sure, I’d be surprised if it was one of those last two. But I do feel very confident that your customers will continue to adopt a “anywhere, anytime, any device” approach to finding the information they need to make a purchase.

Wearables and other tech on the horizon might change the exact form it takes. But your customers have spoken: Mobile commerce is here to stay.

Do you want learn even more about how your customers’ changing behavior shapes e-commerce and marketing? Be sure an register to receive a special report I’ve produced in conjunction with hotel marketing firm Vizergy, “Digital Hotel Marketing in a Multiscreen World.” While it’s targeted specifically at hotel and resort marketers, the lessons apply to just about any business. You can get your free copy of the report here.

You can also check out these slides I had the pleasure of speaking to a great audience yesterday about how to lead digital transformation within large organizations (a topic we’ve been talking about a fair bit lately). Here are the slides for your reference:

And, finally, you might want to take a look at some of our past coverage of the e-commerce, mobile commerce, and digital marketing overall, including:

• 10 Key Posts about Millennials and Mobile: E-commerce Link Digest
• The Secrets Behind “It’s All E-commerce” for 2014
• The Zen of Digital Marketing Strategy
• 7 Steps to E-Commerce Heaven
• Today and Tomorrow: Mobile and The Changing Customer Journey
• Mobile Makes E-commerce Even More “Frictionless”
• Your 2014 Internet Marketing New Year’s Resolutions – Thinks Out Loud Episode 56