Why your store needs to be on the move

It was nice to read something about Guitar Center recently that didn’t focus on its debt problems for a change.

And it is something that affects all retailers in the MI business and indeed in any retailing business. Remember when all the talk was of how your store managed its e-commerce offering? Well, we’re beyond that now of course and it’s all about your store’s mobile offering.

So much so that at the end of last year Guitar Center took on a new head of e-commerce, Michael Amkreutz, who intends to integrate a new online platform with an improved customer experience and mobile at the heart of it.

“When this launches, I am going to be very excited about the new look and feel, the new navigation. What’s really going to be the material difference is the way SKUs are set up, the number of SKUs we can add on as we expand into new categories, the marketability across the site,” he told internetretailer.com.

Adding a sound function to the site using 3D modelling will enable customers to get a much better sense of what an instrument actually plays like. And it is just one of a number of improvements the firm will make to its online retail proposition.

But it is in mobile where Amkreutz apparently sees the biggest opportunity and expects the firm’s current mobile sales conversion rate of 0.5 per cent to improve significantly. The firm does 15-20 per cent of its business online and 25 per cent of that is on mobile devices. 

“Because the conversion is lower on mobile, I’d say there’s definitely an opportunity to double down on the level of investment in the mobile experience,” he said recently. “It doesn’t require a whole lot of convincing. Musicians love smartphones too.”

Well, that’s just great right? You’ve already spent more than you wanted to on your online offering and now you’ve got to get it mobile friendly too. But if you’re sure whether it will be worth the investment here’s a few facts and figures about mobile use that you should pay attention to.

Get a load of this….

• There are some 1.2bn people worldwide using their phones to go online.
• 58 per cent of US consumers own a smartphone
• 31 per cent of all UK site traffic is mobile – 47 per cent in Australia; 40 per cent in Brazil, 31 per cent in the US and eight per cent in France. No idea what France’s problem with that is. 
• Some 30 per cent of shoppers will abandon a transaction if your site is not optimised for mobile use.
• 51 per cent of US shoppers will search online and then go to the store.
• Only 17 per cent will visit the store and then buy online
• 32 per cent will research online, try the product in-store and then buy online
• 71 per cent of global mobile web users expect a mobile page to load as quick or quicker than their home computer
• Every 100 millisecond increase in page loading time decreases sales by one per cent.
• 57 per cent of mobile shoppers will abandon the transaction if they have to wait more than three seconds
• 63 per cent of people expect to be doing more mobile shopping in the next three years
• 61 per cent of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience
• 57 per cent will not recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site
• 41 per cent will go to your competitor
• Mobiles account for 25.85 per cent of all email openings
• 71 per cent of mobile purchasing decisions are most influenced by emails from companies
• 36 per cent of retailer emails are opened exclusively on mobile devices

Pretty convincing stuff, as you can see. Oh and if you want to know where we’re going after that?  Smart TV. By 2018 there are expected to be 191.4m connected TV users in the US alone. You can’t say you weren’t warned.