SCHWARTZ CROSSROADS

Retail in Your Pocket

Retailing exists for no other reason than to fulfill our holiday wish lists. While the stores are open year round, they only start making money at the start of the holiday shopping season, hence the name “Black Friday.”

So the start of the 2008 holiday shopping season seems as good a time as any to examine where the mobile retailing market is headed.

While the mobile web has received quite a bit of attention over the last year, and will continue to be on the forefront for the foreseeable future, not many people use their mobile phones for ecommerce.

My client Mark Watson, CEO of Volantis, recently pointed out to me that people use their handsets for communicating and social networking, but you don’t often see people shopping on eBay through their mobile phones. That makes sense as eBay is more of a browsing environment and people tend not to browse on their on the small handheld screens.

The handsets are, however, making inroads in the retail sector. Volantis, for one, operates Ubik.com, which enables any business to create a mobile website. That means even the local bookstore or coffee shop can have a site that works on your little LG flip phone as well as on that sleek new iPhone you asked Santa to bring this year.

Mobile Monday was filled with players looking to take retailing and retail advertising to the mobile phone.

Drync, which has its primary purpose as helping people use their mobile device to remember and research wines, has an added benefit of allowing people to purchase wines right then and there. So if you think about a person who is out and tries a wine, they can find out more information then order a few bottles delivered to their home before ever leaving the restaurant.

Ordering products through the mobile phone is great, but imagine getting the same information in the store as you do online. It’s one thing to walk into the Home Depot and pick up a cordless drill. It’s quite another to pick up that drill and then be able to see customer reviews.

Mobegic is working with retailers to help them match their mobile sites with the depth of their fixed Internet sites. The idea is to make it so people can access the same information on their mobile phones as they have at their computer screens. In the store people have more information to use to shop while other shoppers can make purchases even when they are neither in the store nor at their computers. This starts to blend the world of online and offline commerce in a way that has never been possible.

A major advantage of shopping online is the ability to quickly and easily comparison shop. If you think back to the days before the online world we would comparison shop by going from store to store. That worked for expensive items like cameras, cars and furniture, but when it came to smaller items we usually just followed our instinct. Now we can comparison shop for everything, even a gallon of gas.

But what happens if you come across an item in a store and just don’t know if this is a good price? Pongr answers that problem by letting you take a picture of the item and then search for it based on image recognition. Not only can you find the best prices but you can also look for more information on that particular product.

In many ways all of these companies are aimed at the same goal: leveling the retail playing field. They put information into the hands of consumers and let them make the choice as to where, when and how to buy.

What the consumers and retailers do with this new-found freedom and power is what we should be watching for with the next holiday season.