It said, “From what we could tell there were several million posts worth of coupons posted and shared across the social networks. We were amazed to see how frequently they were for mostly offline retailers like Radio Shack. Radio Shack even beat both Apple and Amazon in terms of virality around coupons. … A lot of other “brick and mortar” retailers like Walmart did well. We think it’s likely that IBM massively underestimated the impact of social on retailers by only focusing on online retailers.”
 
I’m inclined to agree with Peter Kafka’s take published on All Things D. He said, “It really is hard to believe that all that chatter didn’t result in more people clicking through to the stores themselves. So, perhaps future studies will figure out a more refined way of tracking that traffic … .”

Predictably, Apple’s iPad dominates with 88.3 percent of tablet sales. Nook came in with 3.1 percent, Kindle, 2.4 and the Galaxy tablet 1.8. Others had 4.4 percent. In a report titled “The iPad Factor,” I.B.M. said, “The [Apple] iPad generated more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, reaching nearly 10 percent of online shopping. This was followed by iPhone at 8.7 percent and [Google] Android 5.5 percent.”
 
That’s from an All Things D story that said, “And, over at eBay and its PayPal unit — which spewed out all kinds of data on mobile transactions that showed volume was between two and three times greater, mostly on Apple devices — the company noted that one of its bestselling items on Black Friday was the iPad 2, selling 250 per hour from 12 am to 8 am PT.”
 
Again, the tablet really is the gift that keeps on giving. More tablets in more hands opens up a potentially vital channel for retailers. Notre Dame business professor Tonya Bradford offered this for an InformationWeek report: “To remain relevant, retailers must find opportunities to participate in holiday rituals in ways that aid consumers’ attainment of the holidays they imagine — enjoying time with family and shopping when convenient. Technology provides more opportunities for retailers to create these experiences for consumers through their mobile computing devices.”
 
In that story Jay Henderson, strategy Director for IBM Smarter Commerce, summed up the holiday weekend this way: “This year’s holiday shopper was hungry for great deals and retailers didn’t disappoint, rolling out compelling offers which consumers gobbled up on Thanksgiving straight through Black Friday. The big winners were chief marketing officers who used technology to deliver customer experiences that not only connected shoppers with personalized deals but did so at the right touchpoint and at precisely the right time and place, whether on their couch or the store floor.”
 
I would agree with all that, though I would argue that the big winners have been and will continue to be consumers.

One of the companies working to bring quality image recognition technology to the e-commerce market is iTraff Technology, developers of Recognize.im. With offices in Dallas and its headquarters in Poznań, Poland, the company and its products have won awards and recognition around Europe. This summer in Greece iTraff won the Mobile Services Innovation Platform 2012 competition, besting more than 30 finalists from Great Britain, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Italy and the United States.


Created in 2010 iTraff is perhaps best known for SaveUp, its mobile shopping application. It’s also behind the Art4Europe, an app that helps users recognize works of art. In addition to retail, iTraff hopes to impact publishing and marketing. Investors include SpeedUp Venture Capital Group, Innovation Nest, Rafall Han and Stephane Senkowski.


Earlier this month iTraff introduced me as the newest member of its advisory board. I’m excited to see how mobile applications will use image recognition and capitalize on a $4 billion global market. But I know they will. I can picture it.

Vicki Cantrell, executive director of the National Retail Foundation’s Shop.org, has said, “Consumers can expect even more of an integrated shopping experience this holiday season with companies also looking to enhance their mobile marketing efforts to capture the attention of the millions of holiday shoppers who are already thinking about their shopping lists.”
 
With the approach of the holiday season it seems that a day doesn’t go by when we don’t hear about an online retailer getting more aggressive in stores or a brick-and-mortar retailer introducing a new offering online. Offers of discounts, price matching and free shipping don’t hurt either, nor have big pushes from big players like Amazon and Facebook.
 
Reasons for optimism abound
 
Amid all the holiday sales forecasts floating around these days, this one from Forrester Research jumped out at me: Online shopping in the U.S. will be up 15% this holiday season to $68.4 billion; and average spend will be up 12%. Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, has been quoted as saying that the increase stems from two things: online holiday shopping and mobile commerce.
 
Recently I read that “just in time for the holidays” Target would make Wi-Fi available in all its stores. That’s quite a change from a year ago, when some retailers suggested blocking signals and changing barcodes in effort to combat showrooming.
 
This year – and it’s really happened this year — retailers have embraced the reality that consumers are gathering shopping information with their smartphones. They’re taking advantage of the fact that consumers know a lot about products in stores and they’re using mobile applications to help them make a buying decision. This year, I think, you’ve seen retailers and consumers getting on the same page and leveraging mobile technology. Clearly both have benefited.
 
Big numbers, big potential
 
It’s estimated that among owners of mobile devices, 18% of smartphone owners and 24% of tablet owners have purchased through those devices. Those numbers demonstrate the huge opportunity here. Here are some more: Forrester estimates that by the end of the year, 60 million consumers will own tablet computers. Another reason to love the tablet: conversion rates. It stands to reason that consumers are more likely to make a decision to buy in the relative calm of their home with the benefit of the larger product images of the tablet.
 
What huge potential, and it’s still largely untapped.

So retailers create an opportunity to capture an engaged consumer. When a digital receipt lands in a customer’s inbox, it could also contain recommendations based on his purchase history, a second chance at a deal, coupons, upcoming sale announcements, and an update on his loyalty or rewards program standing. Generating more interactions and sales will also generate more data for the retailer to analyze, fine-tune its approach, and start the cycle over again.
 
Customers must see the benefits
 
Both retailers and consumers can gain a measure of security from digital receipts as well, say industry experts. Take returns: Certainly, a receipt with a digital trail makes returns a breeze for a busy customer. That record also helps insulate against fraudulent returns, which cost retailers more than $14 billion last year alone, according to the National Retail Federation.
 
Naturally, some customers have concerns. In an ebook on digital receipts, Raymond R. Burke wrote that, “If consumers don’t understand how technology will help them, they often assume it will be used against them.” According to Burke, a study at Indiana University’s Center for Retailing showed that more than 60 percent of consumers welcome personalized offers as long as they don’t feel their individual-level information is at risk of being sold or exploited.
 
E-receipts moving beyond email
 
Though e-receipts are just now gaining a firm foothold, they’ve been around since Apple Stores introduced them in 2005. Since then, retailers have been innovating beyond the inbox. Digital receipting has liberated Nordstrom clerks, allowing them to check out a customer anywhere in the store on dedicated mobile devices. Some retailers are choosing to skip email completely and offer electronic receipts via password-protected sites online. Services such as MyReceipts, which is being used by Whole Foods, allow consumers to review their purchase history or import receipts into financial software. Retailers then have access to this data as well.
 
Receipts are entering the mobile domain, of course. California-based Proximiant developed its patent-pending Touch and Go technology to interact with existing point-of-sale systems through near field communications. Customers tap a small device at the register with their smartphone to receive an e-receipt. After beta-testing with several Bay Area retailers, Proximiant is working with a dozen major national retailers to install its technology, which has a built-in CRM and mobile marketing platform as well.
 
Going paperless obviously fits the eco-friendly culture of a brand like Whole Foods. But e-receipts may have a larger impact than many realize. According to e-receipt company allEtronic, those tiny little slips of thermal paper are responsible for 9.6 million trees being cut each year in the U.S.

Dover Saddlery is the leading multichannel retailer of equestrian products in the United States with sales last year of $78 million. When Dover noticed a steady increase in customers’ use of mobile devices to place orders, the Massachusetts company moved swiftly to embrace mobile commerce and improve the tablet and smartphone experiences its riders clearly wanted. This year, Dover projects about 8.8 percent of its sales will come from mobile commerce — 44 percent more than a year earlier. That’s what paying attention to your customers can do for you.

While there is research that shows nearly half of mobile purchases are made by customers inside their own homes, Dover Saddlery customers are logging in from the barn and on the go. “It makes a lot of sense that they would then use their Internet-connected devices to both browse and shop as they come across new things they may want to buy, or restock things they are running low on,” says Dover’s director of e-commerce, Monique Trulson.

An example for smaller retailers

Dover customers can set up recurring orders and take advantage of personalized offers. About 11 percent of Dover’s website traffic comes from mobile, according to Trulson, and of that figure, nearly two-thirds are using tablets.

That knowledge led the company to optimize the electronic version of its catalog to take advantage of the iPad’s capabilities and highlight products in new and exciting ways, Trulson said. The online catalog launched in September and Dover is expanding its other mobile offerings as well. Trulson said it’s currently exploring responsive web design, which adapts its presentation to the device being used to access it.

Dover Saddlery’s successes are proof that small and niche retailers can gain the same benefits from mobile that have been claimed by their larger brethren. Mobile can expand a smaller company’s reach by creating a well-functioning shopping experience that saves customers time and trouble. “In many cases, your mobile site can help you capture those impulse purchases inspired as people are out and about and introduced to your products in social situations,” Trulson said.

Advance work is key

Isn’t creating a mobile-friendly site a lot of work? Trulson says no – it means “very little extra work as you determine how valuable this traffic is for your company.” She says the advance work is key: Setting up your analytics then monitoring them and learning to interpret what the reports are telling you. With those in place, you’re ready to build mobile solutions to suit your audience.

Trulson says Dover is dedicated to analyzing trends in customer behavior as well as monitoring feedback from social media. And a great number of its employees are involved in the equestrian community themselves, giving rise to their tagline, “We put our riding experience to work for you every day.”

 
2. Make it easy
 
Here Payvment and Lish have it mostly right. It’s easy to set up an account to sell through Payvment, and Lish makes payments easy with its connection to PayPal. But with just five categories for products, scrolling on Lish can border on mind numbing. No wonder TechCrunch called it “a impulse shopping site for cheap ridiculousness.”
 
3. Make it mobile
 
Yeah, surprise. But remember that the vast majority of retail purchases happen in stores, and mobile devices bring that gap between in-store and online. Mobile devices are also most useful at the point of purchase, when users have that item in their hand and are making a buying decision.
 
4. Keep the room-size manageable
 
Payvment CEO Jim Stoneham wrote in AllThingsD that, “If we’re going to be successful using social discovery to drive meaningful commerce revenues, we have to drive broad social discovery by giving people easy ways to work up the engagement curve and engage in conversation … .” But we’ve all been to those huge parties where it can be hard to find someone to have a conversation with; and that’s what can happen when you’re shopping with everyone else on Facebook. True social shopping has to have an element that allows the user to control with whom he or she is sharing the experience. The “trending” models don’t do this.
 
5. Keep the conversation relevant
 
Here’s the guts of it: As we work to monitor the participants in the conversation, we have to keep it relevant by leveraging the information in the users’ social graphs. Payvment doesn’t yet do this, but says it will. That’s really the key to making this whole thing go.
 
6. Keep control transparent
 
Online experiences are often tricky, as users correctly worry about privacy. Add money to the equation and the potential pitfalls multiply. It’s vital as we refine social shopping that we hand over as much control as is practical to the users and brands involved. We’ve all seen with Amazon the problems that can arise when we don’t.

We can track the store the customer is in, what he or she scanned, and can match that with who they are, where they live, even their credit score and other demographic information. We’ve built Hadoop clusters that allow us to start targeting customers in unique ways: just college graduates, just Hispanic customers, just people who shop only within a mile of their homes, people who have recently moved, people who have lived in their homes for five years, and so on.
 
I talked too about how ShopSavvy works with a number of retailers, including Best Buy, to help them use showrooming to their advantage. Remember there are only about 1,200 other Best Buy stores and 43,000 other consumer electronics stores. With ShopSavvy, Best Buy can turn those other stores into showrooms, targeting customers there with online or store purchases or offering accessories, warranties, or other value-added services.
 
Just look at Apple stores; they’re showrooms. And Bonobos, which features one of each item but no stock for sale. If showrooming is so bad, I asked, why are the hottest online companies so anxious to build stores and get in front of people?
 
Plenty of good speakers preceded me at the conference. Here are some of their greatest hits:
 

• Anoop Kulshreshtha, director of e-commerce and Web development for The Vitamin Shoppe, predicted 2017 will be the year of omni-channel. He talked about what retailers need to get from where we are today to a real omni-channel strategy.

 

• Nikki Baird of RSR Research identified six e-commerce capabilities that set retailers apart. No. 1: Social. No. 2: Community.

 

• Jack Abraham, director of local for eBay, advised retailers worried about showrooming to make their inventories easily searchable online. “It’s what consumers want, and where the behavior is moving,” Abraham said. “This is about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it is now.”

JC Penny is another retailer that is ready to make the move. By 2014, the company will have eliminated all its cash registers and will have iPads installed in all its stores. The approach will model the Apple concept of the cash register-free store, which is only fitting since JC Penny’s CEO is Ron Johnson, who was once the head of Apple Retail. As Johnson says, “Think of a physical store without a cash wrap. The money saved by replacing checkout stations with new technology could be invested in improving customer service.”
 
‘An instant cash register’
 
Revel Systems is one company that has created POS software for the iPad. Essentially, the iPad makes it easy, says Lisa Falzone, the co-founder and CEO of Revel Systems. “Apple has already spent billions of dollars creating it and marketing it, and we can put software on it. It’s very user-friendly, very secure and our software can make it a hybrid system.” Just load up the software and stick the iPad on a stand and you have an instant cash register at a fraction of the price.
 
The iPad POS offers retailers the speed of a locally hosted system, but the accessibility of a web-hosted system. It’s fast and user-friendly. Plus, today’s generation knows nothing less than online accessibility and immediate results. When people are used to sitting on their sofas in their pajamas and ordering what they want, when they want, standing in a long line at a store is the last thing they want to do. The iPad cash register makes it feel more like an online purchase, and that is in line with the needs of the modern consumer.