BRotD - Entry 0239 Retail Transformation

Best Reading of the Day

Forbes has a great read that is well worth your time if you like tech, mobile, retail, and everything else I write about in this blog.

Read on:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nitinmangtani/2015/12/22/solving-the-innovators-dilemma-one-touch-at-a-time/

Here is a snippet from the piece:

Why do many successful, well-managed companies that seem invincible, suddenly get impacted by unlikely competitors – companies that were tiny, or that didn’t even exist?

As many of you may recall, this concept was highlighted in the best selling book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s groundbreaking book explained how companies sabotage their future success by focusing too much on their current products and strategy, and underestimating the potential of emerging, disruptive technologies and business models.

This central thesis remains highly relevant today, as evidenced by how mobile commerce is shaking up the retail and consumer marketplaces.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Mobile Beacons to Explode

That title is pretty killer, and I've been saying much the same for a couple of years now.  The folks over at AdAge.com have a great little article on these.

http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/mobile-beacons-explode-a-silver-bullet/301874/

Here is a snippet from the piece:

In the next five years, hundreds of millions of mobile beacon tracking devices will pepper retail shops, restaurants and malls, observers are predicting. Global brands including Carrefour, Ikea, Macy's, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Target signed contracts with beacon providers in the last quarter, according to ABI Research, and Facebook this summer began distributing the trackers for free to small businesses. But analysts suggest beacons are still not the be-all end-all of real-world tracking.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Target Pay? Yeap

The news in mobile payments continues to flow like a river this holiday season.  The latest comes from Target:

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/target-eyes-own-mobile-wallet-as-payments-habits-begin-to-change

Here is a snippet from the piece:

Target is reportedly working on its own mobile wallet, borrowing a page from Walmart as the need to address consumers’ growing demand for smartphone services takes on greater urgency.

It seems to be perfectly clear the major retailers are going to take any steps necessary to ensure a very different future in payments through mobile.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Food Lion Doing Great Work with Mobile Beacons

If buzzwords were a measure of a marketing effort this one might win.

Check out the story over on Mobile Commerce Daily:

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/food-lion-initiates-in-store-mobile-coupons-through-shazam

Here is a snippet from the piece:

Food Lion is giving shoppers a way to save money by using the Shazam application to listen to a location’s music, in an innovative mobile coupon experience that also leverages beacons.

The grocery store chain is providing its in-store shoppers with a modern couponing experience, streamlining the process as well as making it an interesting experience.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Wal-Mart Announces Walmart Pay for Mobile Payments

Pretty enormous news in payments, retail and mobile as Walmart announced Walmart Pay today.

Due to my previous professional involvement in MCX, a consortium of retailers including Walmart who are developing a mobile wallet solution, I am going to keep my comments to a minimum.

Here is a story on this news:

http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/story/Despite-Observers_-Doubts_-Wal-Mart-Says-Walmart-Pay-Won_t-Weaken-Ties-to-MCX

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Starting this month, Wal-Mart will begin testing “in select stores” a service called Walmart Pay, which will be part of the Wal-Mart shopping app and will work with most Apple and Android smart phones, the company says. Customers will be able to load “major” card brands along with the Wal-Mart gift card in the wallet, which will link to point-of-sale readers via quick-response (QR) codes, according to the announcement. The full rollout to all Wal-Mart stores is expected to be complete by the middle of next year.

This sounds pretty similar to the CurrentC solution developed at MCX.  It will be very interesting to see how this develops over time.  Starbucks and Dunkin' Brands use a similar style solution while the tech companies use NFC or other hardware solutions to interact with payment terminals.

Given the very slow adoption Apple Pay is seeing, Google Wallet already went through (now Android Pay), and Samsung Pay is seeing as well it is possible these "retail first" solutions are the way this will be solved.  Just look at Starbucks.  Dunkin' Brands is seeing similar success.  Will each major retailer have to develop their own proprietary mobile payments capability?  That seems inefficient.  Will the Apple Pays of the world ever take off?  Will a "white label" style solution like CurrentC at MCX be the one?

This seems to be a very long slog.  I was involved with this for years and I see many more years ahead.  It will be fun to follow this line though.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Dunkin Brands Goes with Cardfree

On the newswire today.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151209005346/en/Dunkin%E2%80%99-Donuts-Selects-CARDFREE-Mobile-Platform-Generation

Here is a portion of the announcement:

CARDFREE, the leading mobile commerce provider to large merchants, announced that it is the mobile application platform provider enabling Dunkin’ Donuts’ new On-the-Go Ordering app that is currently being tested in Portland, Maine. The company was selected by Dunkin’ Donuts to provide the mobile ordering application solution to make it easier and more convenient for members of the brand’s DD Perks® Rewards Program to place an order from their mobile phone.

Cardfree clearly wants to be a major player in this space but their spin as "the leading ... provider to large merchants" is quite a bit heavy when you look at their current list of customers:

http://www.cardfree.com/partners.html

Sure Taco Bell, Sonic, and Rally's are bit but they vastly overstate their case.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Mobile Payments This Holiday Season

The folks over at Mobile Commerce Daily have a bit of news worth reading.  Suffice it to say Apple Pay hasn't taken off, nor have mobile wallets in general.

Read on:

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/credit-cards-beat-out-mobile-wallets-during-black-friday-report

Here is a snippet from the piece:

Mobile wallet platforms did not fare well during this year’s Black Friday retail frenzy, most likely due to do inconsistency with retailers and consumer use, with Apple Pay at its lowest usage rate and PayPal being used more than others, according to a report from InfoScout.

The holiday weekend is known for its chaotic shopping sprees, with many retailers seeing long lines and disorderly checkout experiences, which may have led consumers’ choice to stick with established payment methods such as credit cards. On Black Friday this year Apple Pay saw only 2.7 percent use with all eligible transactions at retail locations, and Android even lower with 2 percent of possible transactions being used.

In similar news Dunkin Brands has now incorporated Apple Pay in to its mobile wallet, much like Starbucks before it.

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/dunkin-donuts-cracks-open-apple-pay-as-holiday-sales-thicken

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Kroger Dominating

If you don't live near a Kroger supermarket you are an increasingly small audience.  This behemoth is still growing and is already enormous, 2nd only to Walmart.

Here is the full story over on Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2015-12-03/kroger-earnings-the-chain-quietly-gains-on-walmart-whole-foods

Here is a snippet from the piece:

Retail is in the doldrums. Grocery chains are filing for bankruptcy. Former industry darlings like Whole Foods are struggling to boost sales. Amazon is making a big bet on online grocery delivery. Drugstore chains are selling boatloads of food. And for the first time ever, more people are eating out at restaurants than making food at home.

Sound like a recipe for disaster? Not for Kroger, the grocery chain that has been quietly growing its empire to become the second-largest U.S. retailer by sales after almighty Walmart, which derives 56 percent of its sales from groceries.

I only found this piece thanks to the efforts over on MorningNewsBeat so be sure to check there daily:

http://www.morningnewsbeat.com/

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

UX for Mobile - Menu Navigation Methods and the Hamburger Stack

I've referenced the following article a few times in my professional life and found I hadn't grabbed it for my professional blog.  I'm correcting that oversight now.

Ever wonder how and why we build the ways we choose to navigate in your favorite apps?  Have you ever used an app, or website, and thought you had a great "experience" using it, or, more likely, a terrible experience?

Read on:

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/04/08/ux-designers-side-drawer-navigation-costing-half-user-engagement/

Here is a snippet from the piece:

So, you have a mobile app where there are more pages or sections than can fit on a mobile screen at once. Your first thought might be to create a tabbed design, with a row of tabs along the top or buttons along the bottom.

But wait… that extra row of tabs or buttons wastes a lot of valuable real estate on a small mobile display, so let’s not do that. Instead, let’s move the options into a side menu, or side drawer, as our Android team keep reminding me it’s called.

Here is one more article on this:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/24/before-the-hamburger-button-kills-you/

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Black Friday and Cyber Monday News

I may find more stories around the net on what happened yesterday.  If so I'll link them in here.

For now this one is a worthy read.  What happened on Cyber Monday?  Huge sales numbers and overwhelming (literally) demand for online interaction with retailers.

Read on:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/263583/cyber-monday-sales-hit-3-billion-targets-site-o.html?edition=88270

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Cyber Monday finished strong, with Adobe estimating a 12% gain to a record $2.98 billion. And for the full holiday weekend, it says online sales jumped 15% to $11 billion. IBM Watson is reporting an even stronger day, with a 17.3% increase in Cyber Monday sales, and an average order of $126.87.

An impressive amount of those sales came from mobile, which IBM says made up 44.7% of the day’s online traffic, a 16.9% rise from last year. And 27% of all online sales came from mobile devices, a gain of 32.6% from 2014.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Story #2: This one requires a login to see the whole story but the headline is worth catching:
http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/walmart-mobile-dominant-shopping-trend

Here is a snippet from it:
More and more, the endless aisles associated with Walmart's digital arm is accessed through mobile, Fernando Madeira, president and CEO Walmart.com, reported Tuesday morning.

“Mobile firmly established itself as the dominant shopping trend, for both traffic and sales," he said. "Mobile is making up more than 70% of traffic to Walmart.com, and now, nearly half of our orders since Thanksgiving have been placed on a mobile device – that’s double compared to last year. Our customers went from previously mostly searching and browsing on mobile, to making purchases at a much higher rate."

Story #3: The folks at eConsultancy do good work.  Here is a great summary article of Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
https://econsultancy.com/blog/67265-10-huge-shopping-stats-from-thanksgiving-black-friday-2015/

Story #4: If you haven't played 'Cards Against Humanity' you should.  Check out what they did for the holiday shopping season:
https://econsultancy.com/blog/67264-how-one-company-made-over-70-000-selling-nothing-on-black-friday/

Story #5: Mobile dominates on Cyber Monday, but is only the start of the shopping experience as 70% of sales happened on traditional PCs:
http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/mobile-brightens-cyber-monday-with-50pc-of-traffic-30pc-of-sales

Story #6: Stores that closed on Thansgiving outperformed all other stores online.  The big reason stores were being driven to open on Thansgiving was all the eCommerce sales happening that day while their doors were locked.  Today, as retailers catch up online, that is less and less an issue.  Interesting.  If we didn't think eCommerce was table stakes for brick & mortar retailers before is there any doubt now?
http://multichannelmerchant.com/news/stores-that-closed-doors-on-thanksgiving-and-black-friday-outperformed-competitors-online-30112015/

Story #7: Here is the CEO of Macy's saying the death of the Department Store has been grossly over stated:
http://www.businessinsider.com/macys-ceo-department-stores-2015-11

That is all folks!  Until next year.  

BRotD - Entry 0238 History of Online Holiday Shopping

Best Reading of the Day

This little story is actually huge as it provides link after link to other stories that tell one comprehensive view of the history of online shopping during the holidays.

Huge story.  Really cool read.  Check it out:

https://nrf.com/news/the-evolution-of-online-holiday-shopping

Here is a snippet from the piece:

Back in 2005, few of us had high-speed Internet access at home and online holiday shopping was done on the sly during work hours. The first day back at work after Thanksgiving weekend was when online holiday shopping began in earnest. When we first noticed the trend, we coined the phrase “Cyber Monday” and the rest is history.

A decade later, we’re streaming television at home on high-speed Wi-Fi connections, talking with our families and our favorite brands on social media and constantly connected to everything on smartphones and tablets — devices that didn’t even exist 10 years ago.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

Social Media with Mobile and Payments

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday.

Back at it with lots of news from Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

I like this little story about the possible merging of social media with mobile and payments:

http://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com/articles/the-merging-of-social-media-payments-and-mobile/

Here is a snippet from the piece:

No other online channel is driving retail sales and referral traffic quite like that of social media. BI Intelligence reports that between the first quarters of 2014 and 2015, social media increased its share of e-commerce referrals by nearly 200 percent.

And while this year saw the merging of social media and payments into an undeniable powerhouse, social engagement with retail is still limited when it comes to a mobile device. But in 2016, this will change.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant