STORES Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 76)

CONSIDER THIS/ ARTS UPDATE Are You Ready for the Mobile Revolution? BY RICHARD MADER For years there has been much discussion around the use of mobile phones in retail. The potential to interact with the consumer in a more targeted fashion is the driver for retailers to explore new ways to increase loyalty, motivate consumers and increase sales by offering more options via mobile devices. With all the services offered to consumers tail are focused entirely on payments and not to enhance the shopping experience by using the complete set of retail transactions that their mobile devices (multiple credit and debit consumers will demand of retailers for maxicards, loyalty key fobs, access to reward mum service and convenience: placing orpoints and gift card balances, electronic ders, making payments, posting and rereceipts, alerts to valuable promotions), one deeming loyalty points, capturing and rehas to wonder why mobile processing has deeming coupons, purchase/redemption of not been implemented worldwide to meet gift cards, receipts, special offers and reconsumer demand. bates. Standards will be necessary to give conOffering this broad range of services cansumers the convenience of mobile transacnot be accomplished without the involvement tions. ARTS first investigated this potential and leadership of retailers who are the prieight years ago, but like the forecasted remary outlets for consumer services. placement of bar codes with RFID, the impleThere will be many ways to implement all Richard Mader is executive mentation has been slower than expected. of these retail transactions. If retailers, modirector of ARTS. Published reasons include lack of customer bile operators, banks and involved third parincentives to learn new processes, cost to retailers to upties use different data definitions and formats, consumers grade POS devices, potential additional transaction charges will be frustrated by the lack of consistency. Imagine if your from bank cards and mobile operators and bringing all the phone worked differently (or not at all) in some countries. parties together in a true cooperative partnership. Many organizations have begun working to standardize Similar standard data formats various components of mobile transaction, some developThe key to success will lie in achieving a consistent and ing technical standards like new SIM chips for phones, othconsumer-friendly method to exchange information beers on near field communication (NFC) connectivity and tween the consumer’s mobile device and the retailer’s the business processes. A review of their websites inditechnology. What is needed are similar standard data forcates a very limited involvement by retailers. mats for all the above-mentioned transactions. A digital receipt provided to the consumer by either Macy’s or Saks should be readable by the customer’s receipt file; coupons Mobile phones at POS from either P&G or Target should be useable with the payRecent developments, however, indicate the use of moment transaction. Database storage must be the same so bile phones as a comprehensive retail device might be a customer can search a registry in any participating retail close at hand. This makes sense, since more than three store. billion people have mobile phones. ARTS is the expert in retail data. We believe we can help On the EuroShop exhibit floor, I reviewed demonstrations make mobile processing available sooner by applying conof secure payments from mobile phones at point of sale sistency to the various transactions that will make it more from three vendors using contactless connection from the attractive to both retailers and consumers. ARTS will phone to the sales terminal. Both Juniper and Gartner have launch a mobile transaction project in our technical meetrecently forecast exponential growth in mobile couponing ings this month. and payments by 2011, and Amazon.com has recently inWe are researching what has been accomplished and introduced an order and pay by text messaging service. tend to offer our expertise to all those currently involved in Of course, both PayPal and Google have similar special mobile transaction projects. If you have an opinion on this payment methods, and any mobile device with access to topic, I would like very much to hear from you. E-mail me the Internet can select and purchase items. at maderr@nrf.com. Current efforts promoting the use of mobile devices in re76 STORES / JUNE 2008 WWW.STORES.ORG http://Amazon.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - June 2008

STORES Magazine - June 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Tesco Tests Carbon Labels What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Cover Story: Boom - or Bust Green Retailing Concept2Watch Online Marketing Building Traffic Water Management Branding Digital Marketing Loyalty Programs Special Report: Taking on Teens Supply Chain - Robo Crop Human Resources Supply Chain - Directory Assistance Loeb Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

STORES Magazine - June 2008

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