Could this be the year of Christmas Shopping on the Mobile Web?

As Christmas approaches shoppers will be lured into high street stores; however a recent study reveals that retailers should recognise the impact of the mobile internet on their customers’ shopping behaviour.

In the talk “When Mobile User Experience Meets Retail User Experience” presented at Mobile User Experience recently, Andrew Swartz of Serco ExperienceLab discussed how the mobile internet could be used to shape future shopping experiences. It’s well known that the shopping experience frequently involves online and the high street working together, with customers carrying out initial research on the web before visiting a store. What’s changing this relationship is customer’s ability to access the web in-store, while they are shopping for goods.

Serco ExperienceLab’s research reveals that all kinds of retailers can benefit from these new possibilities:

• Online retailers can create apps that use text searches, barcode searches and even photo searches such as Amazon’s Amazon Remembers feature, to make it easy for high street shoppers to place orders for the items they see in the high street.

• Low-cost high street retailers can steal customers from their upscale neighbours using similar apps, taking advantage of the phones’ location-based services to point them to a nearby shop with a lower price for the item in question.

• High-end retailers can enhance the customer experience by providing in-depth online information, compelling videos, comparisons, and detail no shop assistants could keep in their head about their products. And they’ll need to keep the in-store real-world experience compelling too to stop their customers from browsing in their store, but buying next door.

Serco ExperienceLab is planning further customer research to determine how well customers would receive these features and if they would indeed be useful, which will be published in due course. But for now it’s clear that mobile internet provides huge potential for retailers to enhance the shopping experience.

Associated Link: Serco ExperienceLab Blog

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