Whoosh Fitting Rooms (or How not to save the High Street)

Eva Pascoe's weekly Retail Bytes dropped into my inbox earlier this week. It's always a really interesting read about the intersection of retail and technology. This week, one of the things she wrote about and particularly caught my interest was Hointer's latest wheeze, The Whoosh Fitting Rooms. You can watch the video below of how it works. I'd love to know what you think.


I'm horrified that the team at Hointer think it's ok to have clothes shoved to the customer down a chute - not unlike a rubbish chute, in fact. That may be ok for a pair of men's jeans but it most certainly is not ok for a cosy merino wool sweater or a glamorous silk top. And just as bad, if you don't want to buy the item, you throw it back down the chute as if you're throwing it away. Aaaarrrgggghhh. As a former fashion retailer, this is an abomination! As a customer, this is not a way I want to deal with clothes in store.

I know we're in an era of fast fashion, but there is, thankfully, a move towards slower fashion and a move towards buying less and to enjoy what you have much more thanks to the likes of Marie Kondo.

Also, as one friend pointed out on the discussion about this on my Facebook page, never mind that you would need to invest heavily in new fittings and fixtures in store, have the customer download the right app and deal with their mobile screen and the screen in the fitting room, which also means having great connectivity, as well as retrain your store staff in the new system (after all, they would be the ones in the back setting it all up and ensuring stock was in the right place at the right time) and install new point of sale software and checkouts.

In the same thread on Facebook, I lamented that retail staff no longer know how to fold clothes at the cash desk. I find myself refolding clothes at point of sale more times than I care to mention so that they don't get damaged before I've even had chance to wear them. I don't care what price you pay for an item in store or whether that store is a charity shop, Primark, Marks & Spencers or Harrods, I expect my belongings to be handled with care. At the point I pay, those items belong to me, not to the store and as such, they need to be handled accordingly. It doesn't take long to teach someone how to fold garments properly. And once you know, you know for life. It also speeds up the checkout procedure.

So, dear retailers, please ramp up your staff training so that bagging up goods ends up being joyful for both employee and purchaser. And Hointer, please put your collective big brains towards a problem that is actually worth solving.

m-Commerce Learnings–from the Horses’ Mouths

It’s pretty much exactly a year ago since I live tweeted an event organised by my friend Catherine Crawley for the Ecommerce UK Group on LinkedIn. The topic was m-Commerce and it was done Pecha Kucha style. What that meant was that we had 7 expert speakers talking about their experience or thoughts on m-Commerce and they each had 7 minutes in which to speak and answer questions. The gong went if they ran over time and they had to stop at that point to keep everything to time. (I loved the gong. It was a great touch.)

I’d forgotten that I’d done a storify on it when I was pootling on the storify site earlier, so I’ve finished it by including the videos from the evening as well as the slideshare of all the slides used.

I’ve also taken another look at the content, and a year on, it is all still relevant. The issues that retailers face with mobile are very similar – except maybe the screen size has changed and now they’re looking at having to deal with 4G and perhaps the day they need to start taking NFC more seriously is edging closer. But when it comes to consumer behaviour, internal culture, the challenges of dealing with multi-platform and multi-channel retail, the issues are pretty much the same. The usage numbers of course, have only gone one way, and, in the words of Yazz, the only way is up!

So take a look. Listen to the retailers telling their own stories of mCommerce joy and woe… just follow the link.

http://storify.com/technokitten/m-commerce-pecha-kucha-style

The Harrods fake till scam

It’s always busy at Christmas in the retail world, especially for department stores. When I worked in Selfridges in 1990, I think they took on an extra 2000 staff for the season. That was in just one store. They’ve now pared that down but even last year, they took on an additional 1500 staff across their four stores. And come the first day of sale, everyone is on duty along with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before. The concessions will rope in extra staff from quieter branches and may even get additional help from Head Office staff who are usually sitting behind a computer screen for the rest of the year. It is pretty chaotic. We also used tills like the one pictured – although somewhat cleaner.

There was a story that went around at the time about a similar scenario in Harrods. A couple of thousand extra staff in store, and crazy busy with the general public eagerly buying their bargains. On the ground floor, an extra cash-only till was set up to deal with the additional customers. And then at the end of the day, it left as quickly as it had arrived. Full of money. It was a fake till. Some criminals had wheeled it in and it had been used all day by uniformed staff and then it and they left again, with thousands of pounds, no doubt. Or so the story goes. I don’t know if this is true or simply an urban myth. If it’s a myth, it’s easy to see how it could happen.

But that was 1990. Fast forward 20-odd years and we’re talking about a different in-store experience. I was at the Neoworks roundtable last night discussing the latest customer service issues in-store and on-line. One of the biggest customer gripes is having to wait in a long queue to pay. And hurrah, we can now issue staff with tablets so that staff can take payment where the customer is, there and then. With services like iZettle, Square and their ilk, taking payments like this is a breeze. Credit card swiped, confirmation of the amount and off we go.

Except, how do you know that it’s a real member of staff with iPad in hand? How do you know whether or not your card number will be secure? How do you know it’s not a scam in the same vein as the Harrods fake till story?

So before you rush in to adopting some shiny new technology, please have a think about some worst case scenarios so that you can work out ways to counter them so you don’t end up falling victim to some dodgy scam.

And if you’re a consumer, just be careful out there. Security risks are out there in the offline world too.

Mobile coupons: People are the weakest link

I’ve just been reading an article over on Monty Munford’s blog by Rob Thurner about the ‘three things that need to happen before mobile couponing kicks off’. They’re both friends of mine but as a veteran of the mobile couponing business, I feel I should add a comment.

Some of you already know that I have many years experience at the coal face of retail. For those of you who don’t know, I spent the best part of 10 years working in fashion retail and working my way up from sales assistant to store manager in the early years of my working life. I’ve worked my way from the wilds of Worcester High Street to the bling of the West End and Knightsbridge. There’s not much I haven’t seen from store openings to store closings to being held at knifepoint for refusing someone a refund on something they’d clearly stolen. Yes, really. I was also lucky enough to work at the world’s first mobile couponing start-up, ZagMe, where we sent text messages to shoppers at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls. I think I know a bit about how this couponing and retail thing works.

Couponing in the UK is nothing like at the obsession levels that you’ll see in the US. They have shows over there about ‘Extreme Couponing’. I kid you not. We still like a bargain here, but we’re not quite as bothered about it. But it’s still big business and seems to be made for mobile. Well you’d think…

Like many things, usability isn’t quite there yet. But there are workarounds. Back in ZagMe days, we sent coupons via text message. We couldn’t event concatenate the message (that means combine two messages as one). Some phones could only store 10 text messages at the time. Can you believe it?! We’re talking 2000 and 2001. Yes, that long ago. Mobile couponing is not new. The ZagMe texts we sent had a code in them which was generated based on your age, gender, retailer and time of sending. That meant you might see a different code to your friend who received the same message so it looked like they were uniquely generated codes. Now of course, it is entirely possible to put a unique code into a SMS. If you want to. But it really depends on why you’re sending the coupon in the first place and how it’s financed. Since most coupons and discounts are funded out of margin, it doesn’t usually matter whether or not the coupon is shared or replicated. Indeed, that can just reduce the costs for the retailer that they’re getting free distribution. So chances are, you don’t need a unique code necessarily, you just need a way to manage the coupon or discount.

The way to do that is to set up a discount barcode for the specific promotion and have it reside by the side of all of your tills. You’ll need to train your staff properly so they know what to scan and when. And in the text message, email or whatever other coupon format you want to use, you make sure you put in any limitations on the offer – this usually means the date. Don’t have an open-ended offer. And if there are terms and conditions, make sure those are available for both the customer (perhaps via a link to click in the message) and the store staff (at POS and included in the training for example), so there’s no question about when the offer runs out. As it happens, I still have an Ann Summers coupon lurking on my hard drive offering me £5 off any purchase. There is no expiry date. It’s just a gif file. Maybe I should try redeeming it….

In his article, Rob goes on to explain about keyed entry, scanning and NFC as redemption methods. These are all coming. Some retailers who are further ahead have already embraced them. And as each retailer reviews their EPOS systems, they’re going to be thinking about mobile, tablets and offer redemption as part of the new system so we’ll see more. But these systems don’t get replaced every year like mobile phones or school shoes. They’re in place for many years and replacing them isn’t easy and it’s expensive as they impact on the whole supply chain.

But there’s no need to miss out on mobile commerce via couponing for non-food retailers*. You don’t have to wait until you implement your fancy new EPOS systems. Think about workarounds. Think about how secure your couponing needs to be (in which case, you can turn to Eagle Eye for a solution). SMS can still work here and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Or particularly techie for that matter. You just need to think about the customer experience and how you’d like that to be and then work out how to achieve it. And I suspect that eight, if not nine, times out of ten, you won’t need to have something particularly complex.

However, you choose to implement your discount offer – be that on mobile, email or pigeon post – please remember to communicate to your staff. It is no good having the fanciest mobile couponing system in place if your staff have no clue what to do when a customer turns up wanting their £5 off. Your people will be the weakest link if they haven’t been brought up to speed.

*caveat – grocery retail is a lot more complicated than other sectors of retail and the couponing rules are different.

Is mobile couponing finally hitting the mainstream?

It seems like a lifetime ago since I had my first exposure to mobile couponing back in 2000 at ZagMe. Yes, it’s some twelve years ago since I helped invent location based sms couponing with fellow mobilist, Russell Buckley. I’ve seen many coupon projects come and go and I’ve seen many location based services come and go, but finally, we appear to be at the point where this thing is hitting the mainstream. And yet again, we have Apple to thank for it.

May of you will know that I do not worship at the altar of Apple but there’s no denying that they have changed our mobile world forever. And may well be changing the world of mobile couponing forever too with the introduction of Passbook. This is an app that helps you keep track of your mobile coupons, tickets and gift cards. With the added bonus of being location-aware (optional), it can nudge you when you’re near an outlet where you can use said coupons if that company’s app has that feature included. I don’t have a working iPhone so I haven’t tested this myself, but from the description here, it still sounds a bit clunky. But I have no doubt that the clunks will be evened out pretty quickly as there’s more take-up and developers work out how to get the best from the service.

This is first to market in the US, but the UK is catching up. We’re not as coupon obsessed in the UK as the US (where they have a TV show dedicated to the topic), but we do still like a bargain – Groupon and its ilk have been a success here and SalesGossip is also gaining traction. Meanwhile, Harvester has teamed up with Eagle Eye and Millennial Media to be the first UK company to use Passbook for their couponing.

Helen Worrall, Marketing Manager, Harvester said: “We are excited to be amongst the first in line to use this new way to distribute mobile vouchers to Apple Passbook users, offering our customers a better and more convenient experience. Not only does it provide us with a new way of engaging the iOS 6 iPhone users, but the benefit having one central point to digitally distribute and redeem vouchers in real-time means we have more control and visibility over our marketing campaign performance.”

I’m interested to see how this one plays out (you can try out the campaign for yourself if you go to http://tinyurl.com/harvesterPB from your iPhone) and I will be watching to see how the campaign fares as well as keeping an eye out as to how other retailers take on the challenge of digital couponing beyond the iPhone.

Dare I say it? Is this the year of mobile couponing?

Mobile Retail Summit–London 26 Jan 2012

Some of you may have seen me tweet about this already, but the lovely people at Mobile Marketing Magazine are putting on a one-day summit looking at all aspects of mobile retail. This is most certainly a hot topic and mainstream retailers are now beginning to see the light and are focussing efforts in m-commerce and m-retail. And it’s working for them. There are some terrific success stories out there.

I’m very happy to be involved in the summit. I’ll be there all day as I’m doing a short history of LBS (that’s location based services), moderating a panel on mobile payments and discussing the future of mobile at the end of the day with friends and colleagues Russell Buckley and Jonathan MacDonald.

The good news about the summit is that it’s free for retail, FMCG and CMG executives to attend. At the time of writing, there are just 30 places left and if you join the session, you’ll be mingling with the likes of John Lewis, Debenhams, Tesco, Oasis, Coca Cola, Amazon and Homebase. And if you’re not in that category, then you can buy a ticket for £595.

Check out the Agenda below, and head for mretailsummit.com to book your place. It should be a good day. Hope to see some of you there.

Agenda

8.15am - 9.00am Registration & Exposition

9.00am - 9.10am Chairman's Introduction. David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine

9.10am - 9.25am Going Mobile - The Big Picture. Nic Newman, MD, Tigerspike

9.25am - 9.35am On Device Stat Attack. Alex Kozloff, Mobile Manager, IAB . Alex will reveal research showing the volume of mobile web browsing, how many people are engaged in mCommerce, etc.

9.35am - 9.50am mCommerce in Action. Hugh Ritzema-Carter, UK Commercial Director, YOC. Hugh will represent case studies showing how retailers have successfully deployed mCommerce solutions

9.50am - 10.15am Keynote Address. Sarah Baillie, Mobile Commerce Coordinator, Debenhams. Building a Holistic Mobile Offering Embracing Apps and Mobile Sites

10.15am - 10.30am How to build a mobile site and integrate it with your backend systems. Duncan Hallas, European Director Sales, Netbiscuits

10.30am - 10.45am 10 Rules for Building Mobile Apps. Rupert Ashwell, Head of Client services, UK Golden Gekko

10.45am - 11.15am coffee break, mobile exposition, mobile surgery

11.15am - 11.30am Mobile Search, Mobile App Discoverability Discussion Panel

Guest Moderator: Simon Andrews
Panellists:
Nicholas Cumisky, Sr. Industry Manager, Ad Mob
Emily Gudeman, Account Director, Efficient Frontier
Ramy Yared, MD, Adsmobi
Peter Glaeser, co-founder and CEO SponsorMob.
Andrew Emmerson, Senior Business Analyst, JD Williams

11.30am - 11.40am Multichannel Stat Attack. Matthew Hopkinson, Business Development Director, Local DataCompany. We take a look at how tough it is out there. With falling sales, and consumers shopping less in the recession period, this is a great time to use every tool at your disposal to get people into your shops, and here is how mobile can help retailers do just that

11.40am - 11.55am Mobile CRM. Anamaria Chiuzan, Retail Propositions Manager, Velti
How to build and manage an opted-in mobile CRM database to drive traffic into your retail outlets

11.55am - 12.10pm Using Social Media to Drive Footfall. Matt Gierhart, Head of Social, Ogilvy

12.10pm - 12.25pm A Brief History of Location-based Services. Helen Keegan, Specialist in Mobile Marketing, Advertising & Media. Helen offers a summary of the past 12 years of location-based services, from her work in the early noughties with ZagMe, through to the present day

12.25pm - 12.40pm Using Mobile Advertising to Drive Footfall. Stephen Jenkins, Marketing Director EMEA, Millennial Media

12.40pm - 1.00pm Mobile Advertising Advice Panel.

Moderated by: Russell Buckley, Chief Marketing Officer, Eagle Eye Solutions
Panellists:
Alex Rahamen, CEO of StrikeAd
Paul Childs, Chief Operations Officer, Adfonic
David Fieldhouse, Linking Mobile
Doug Chisholm, Founder and CEO, Rippll

1.00pm - 2.30pm lunch, exposition, mobile surgery, speed networking, mobile pitch panel

2.30pm - 2.40pm In-Store Stat Attack. Alistair Hill, On Device Research

2.40pm - 2.55pm In-Store Price Comparison. How the phone can help you close the sale in store, using on-shelf links to information on the mobile web. Dave Marutiak, Managing Director, Scanbuy

2.55pm - 3.10pm Mobile Couponing and Vouchering. Steve Rothwell - Eagle Eye Solutions
What is the state of play with mobile coupons and vouchers? What are the issues, how are they being overcome, and which retailers are successfully using mobile coupons and vouchers?

3.10pm - 3.30pm Mobile Payments - The Options. Discussion Panel. Overview of what's out there, from NFC to SMS-based mobile payment systems.

Guest Moderator: Helen Keegan, Specialist in Mobile Marketing, Advertising & Media
Panellists:
Ivor Morgan, Head of EMEA Marketing, Venda
John Milliken, MD, Mobile Money Network
Mary Carol Harris, Vice President, Mobile Development at Visa Europe
Iain Herd, PayPal

3.30pm - 4.00pm coffee break, exposition, mobile surgery

4.00pm - 4.15pm Augmented Reality Demos. Matt Mills, Head of Innovation, Autonomy

4.15pm - 4.30pm iPad Kiosks & Queue Busting Solutions. Justin Coward, MD, Global Bay

4.30pm - 4.50pm Google Demos. Amanda Rosenberg, Mobile Business Development Manager, EMEA, Google

4.50pm - 5.15pm Alternative Views on the Mobile Future

Moderated by: David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine
Panelists:
Russell Buckley, Chief Marketing Officer, Eagle Eye Solutions
Jonathan MacDonald, Co-founder at This Fluid World & Co-Founder at Human Dialogue
Helen Keegan, Specialist in Mobile Marketing, Advertising & Media

5.15pm - 5.25pm Chairman's Closing Remarks. David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine

5.30pm - 7.00pm networking drinks, exposition, mobile pitch results

Tuesday linkage

It is Tuesday right? And it is March already (how did that happen)? So it must be time for some links.

This is an interesting post from the Admob blog about iphone advertisers best practice. I would say that quite a few of those tips and hints are relevant for anyone doing stuff in mobile advertising. It’s not exactly rocket science (but then mobile advertising isn’t) but it’s good to be reminded of the simple stuff every now and then. And this is a great checklist.

Bango is also running an interesting experiment in running a mobile website, Mobislim. They have a real mobile website set up and are sharing all the analytics, results, learnings and more with their audience in a blog format. If you are a mobile webmaster looking to commercialise your offering, this is well worth keeping an eye on.

If stats are your thing then have a look at MSearchGroove’s post covering stats around mobile web traffic, mobile search and advertising. Peggy Anne Salz has some interesting insight and links to share.

There was a little flurry of excitement about Process Away recently and their iphone App. Agreed, it looks really good and looks like a great solution to be able to take payments at your live event without a huge investment in hardware, software, wifi and the rest. That I don’t doubt. But who are they and why would I trust them with my money? And even looking at the FAQs, that doesn’t reassure me much. Seeing as folks making business decisions about technology are very often  not technologists, the technology jargon about security is meaningless. Some explanation of who you are, some reassurance that customer’s money is safe, some reassurance of how the service is underwritten and this could be a real goer. Or am I being a curmudgeon here?

I’ve been asked to be a judge for 2009’s Mobile Messaging Awards which is very exciting. Get those entries in! I’m also judging this year’s Webby Awards… still very North American in its focus which is a shame as I firmly believe there is mobile talent beyond those shores. I guess there’s always next year to enter…

Technorati Tags: links,mobile,statistics,m-commerce,m-payments,m-retail,m-transactions,awards,160characters,mobile web,mobile internet,admob,mobile advertising,iphone

Tesco supports m-retail... or does it?

For those of you who don't know already, I spent the best part of 10 years of my working life in retail - mostly fashion, and mostly in and around London's Oxford Street and Knightsbridge. Later on in my career, I worked for ZagMe, the location based marketing company who marketed to customers via SMS at Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls, and much of that time was spent working with retailers creating and running campaigns for them. So I have more than a passing interest in things retail.

So I've been keeping an eye on the m-retail or m-commerce world and was very interested to see that UK grocery retailer, Tesco has joined the world of m-retail after successful trials of ordering flowers via mobile for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

As an aside, Tesco also claims that it's wap portal is a great success attracting over 300,000 customers in December last year. And not only that, but that's it's customers are hungry for ads.

"Banner advertising served up on the portal delivered a click-through rate to tailored WAP campaign sites of between three and seven per cent, said Tesco. Brands advertising on the portal included Bee Movie, ITV, Nivea and Teletext.

Tesco said the user-base of the portal has a strong segment of female household budget owners with an average age of 36 - a demographic it said is particularly valuable for fast-moving consumer goods such as toiletries and cleaning products.
According to a survey commissioned by Tesco, more than half (60 per cent) of portal users are female and the same percentage said they visit the portal at least once a month, while 69 per cent claimed they would click on a relevant advert."

So this all bodes well for entering the world of m-commerce. So I thought I'd check it out.

Alas for me, going to http://www.tesco.com/ from my mobile takes me to the main Tesco website with no adaption for the mobile screen whatsoever - large file sizes (well comparatively large when dealing with mobile), navigation required up/down and left/right so you can't actually see anything properly.

It occurred to me that they'd probably done a mobile specific site so I also tried http://www.tesco.mobi/ and http://m.tesco.com/ and neither of those worked.

So it looks like I can't do a review of the service for you.

I then thought, well maybe it's for Tesco Mobile customers only (Tesco Mobile being the pay as you go MVNO with O2), especially since their wap portal has been such a success.

And then I saw how much data charges were on Tesco Mobile... £4 per megabyte. Yes, that's right, a whopping £4 a megabyte. And there's no mention of whether or not access to the Tesco Mobile Portal is free of charge or not. In fact, there's no mention at all of any Tesco Mobile Portal or any Tesco mobile shopping service.

There's a free Tesco sim offer on at the moment, I may give it a go although I really don't fancy spending £4 a megabyte to check out their mobile portal and m-commerce offerings.

On the commercial side of the equation, I know that 02 is heavily pushing mobile retail services and is touting Tesco as it's major success story and case study (there's even a video I've seen about it). But if you're going to make your shop invisible and then charge for entry, isn't that just a bit daft?

Hmm. What's going on?

If anyone can shed any light on what's going on with Tesco m-retail and Tesco's wap portal and relevant data charges, please let me know either via the blog or via email.

And on a parting note, I think this quote (via Silicon.com) from Ashley Schofield, head of customer management at Tesco Mobile, is somewhat ironic:

"Our customers are showing a real appetite for more products and services
through the mobile internet. Delivering more great experiences and value through
our portal is a priority for this year."

Ashley, I'm not sure how you can deliver more great experiences and more value through the portal when you're charging £4 a megabyte.