Mobile retail / ecommerce parallels: Part one - the platform wars

Those of us who have developed for the Web remember when you had to create different versions of your site for every browser or face the consequence of dumbing everything down to render properly on America Online. Animation? Javascript? Interaction? Forget it; straight HTML and GIF images, or you risk alienating a big chunk of visitors to your site.

Mobile retail faces a similar challenge today: to go beyond the raw simple mobile Web page, retailers need to embrace many different platforms, each with its own development environment, ecosystem, simplicities and complexities. Each smartphone platform has its own capabilities and unique challenges and opportunities, and the reality is that retailers looking to truly embrace mobile retail and thrive in that ecosystem HAVE to develop excellent apps across a critical mass of platforms.

While every retailer will face different mobile demographics across their customer base (teens shopping Forever 21 are far more likely to be heavy texters than customers of Coldwater Creek, for example), a good starting point is the current market share for both mobile phones and smartphones:

Mobile Phone Marketshare	Smartphone Marketshare
Nokia - 36.7% Samsung - 19.6% LG - 10.3% Motorola - 4.5% Sony Ericsson - 4.3% Others - 24.6%	Nokia - 39.3% Research in Motion - 20.8% Apple - 17.1% HTC - 6.5% Samsung - 3.2% Others - 13.1%

What this means for retailers is that if they are considering deploying a true smartphone application that will both add functionality based on the device beyond a simple mobile Web site and will hit a critical mass of their audience, they have to develop for several discrete smartphone plaftforms: Nokia, RIM (Blackberry), Apple (iPhone), Windows Mobile... and now Samsung.

This does indeed hearken back to the ecommerce days when a Web site needed to be tweaked and optimized for Netscape, Internet Explorer, America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy (and yes, I'm finding myself lost in a wave of Web-based nostalgia)... but eventually, this settled into a standard set of functions and code that works across virtually every browser today.

Unfortunately, such a time is quite a ways off for mobile retailing, for three primary reasons:

1. Carrier influence and customization of the user experience. Unlike my laptop, where my operating system (Mac OS X) and my browser (Firefox) determine most of my UI, cell phones often have the operating system (for example, Windows Mobile) overlaid with a custom interface developed either by the handset manufacturer (HTC, for example), the carrier (Sprint) or some combination of all three. This means that simple concepts like determining a user's location, detecting a finger swipe, or auto-detecting screen orientation are done literally thousands of different ways, making cross-handset application development a nightmare for the retailer.
2. Lack of convergence of economic model. Ecommerce was simple: everyone could go direct, and for a while, everyone did. You suddenly had manufacturers selling direct, followed promptly by echoing "Doh!"s and palm slaps to the forehead as they discovered that retailing was more than putting your catalog and a shopping cart online. But to create a mobile retail experience, the economic interests of user, brand/manufacturer and retailer all need to be aligned... and they aren't. Look at it this way: Proctor & Gamble doesn't care whether you buy Tide at Safeway or Albertsons, so long as you buy Tide... Safeway doesn't care whether you buy Tide or Woolite, so long as you buy it at Safeway... and the consumer simply wants the best deal. Mobile provides an execution vehicle that allows targeting individual shoppers, but without a more unified trade promotions and advertising model, mobile will remain a sideline to more traditional advertising.
3. A lack of organizational responsibility for mobile. Just as retailer struggled with the question of who "owns" ecommerce and how to manage it within the retail enterprise, mobile faces similar orphan status. It has the potential to be the true connection between Web sites and stores (touching the spheres of influence of both the ecommerce and store operations groups), it united manufacturer trade promotion dollars with retailer marketing (forcibly uniting buyers and marketers), and it bridges the gap between retailer technology infrastructure and customer-owned devices (blurring the line between IT and customer service). It's confusing as all hell, and unless retailers slice through the Gordian knot of their own organizational structure and embrace mobile as a top-level customer experience priority with a "czar" empowered to simply make it happen.

Execution is hard, and mobile raises the bar. Samsung's new platform has the potential to help simplify the problem, but it ain't EVER going to be easy for retailers. But it's worth doing, and retail winners in 2011 will spend 2010 diving in and investing their own resources in developing their strategies.