It's 2015—Are You Thinking Mobile-first?

By: Ajit Melarkode, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Rackspace

The unlimited availability of products, competitive pricing, additional discounts, logistic support and hassle free payment fuelled the e-commerce industry in the year 2014. Its growth rate was twice as fast as retail. However, just as companies were working towards taking their business online and settling in with this new trend, a profound paradigm shift it is facing in current times is the swift transition from e-commerce to mobile commerce (m-commerce). A recent A Gartner study stated that about 30 per cent of traffic for e-commerce sites come from mobile and tablets. Thus, online and offline merchants alike need to take note and adjust their IT strategies to compete.

A report published by Forrester research also throws some favourable numbers. India is the second largest mobile market in terms of subscribers after China with 900 million mobile subscriptions. Interestingly, 92 per cent of Internet subscribers in India access the Internet via mobile phones and wireless dongles - making it one of the most lucrative targets for online retailers.

Due to this rapid transition in the growth rate, the m-commerce industry is bound to be very demanding and challenging in terms of computer agility, information transfer capability (bandwidth) and the ability to process information. Above all, everything has to work smoothly and efficiently. A Rackspace survey released in September 2014 found that while huge numbers of consumers in Asia-Pacific are using their smartphones to browse and purchase items on m-commerce websites, the impact of a poor user experience could be damaging. As per the report, consumers’ frustration level runs high, as 78 per cent of consumers surveyed experience technical issues while browsing sites on their smartphones which directly impact their purchasing decisions and perception of the company. 28% of consumers surveyed said that they would not make purchases from an m-commerce site if they experience technical glitches. Nearly all of them – a phenomenal 93 per cent mentioned that their view of a brand would be affected if its website did not work smoothly and consistently posed the same problems.

Since industry experts believe that m-commerce would contribute up to 70 per cent of their total revenues, marketers with digital and mobile commerce initiatives need to focus on encouraging the development of cross-functional teams as well– including IT, sales, customer support and legal – to create seamless path-to-purchase experiences and customer loyalty. This brings in a unique set of challenges for them. The average online attention span of a consumer is shorter in comparison to those shopping at offline stores. A successful website has to meet the needs of its users and convince them to take speedy decisions.

It’s a challenge, but also a major opportunity. The merchants get to offer a myriad of new opportunities to engage with buyers through alternate engagement platforms – such as social media and shopping apps- while they can continue to add new design elements and introduce performance improvements to be the leader in the industry.

Current m-commerce merchants or anyone thinking about entering the world of m-commerce must consider the demands of multiple areas in technical expectations to build a successful strategy. Ultimately the desired, customer experience drives the business focus, the technologies used and the security measures implemented to build trust, loyalty, repeat business and referrals. A successful e-commerce strategy relies on a great cloud strategy. It will deliver enhanced levels of performance with greater speed, load times and reliability to customers.

If a m-commerce player works consistently with a managed cloud company, it can build a long-term growth plan for the retail company’s fast-growing web business. It helps the merchant to focus on developing business while the cloud company can managed the backend IT infrastructure. Identifying some such back-end aspects for growth of business.

Maximise site performance – E-commerce is all about uptime and performance. Regardless of a site’s design, if it runs slowly or crashes often, it means loss of potential customers. Therefore, the primary indicator of site performance is page load time. Maximising site performance is one way to minimise bounce rates and keep all customers happy and spending.

Make Sure It’s Mobile Ready - An e-commerce operator without a clearly defined mobile strategy risks losing their all-important competitive advantage. An effective mobile strategy should include optimizing the site to deliver a consistent and seamless experience regardless of what platform or mix of platforms the customer chooses to use. To this day, we can still see sites that ask consumers to choose which device they are accessing the site from. This has got to change with mobile ready sites that auto-detect and optimize.

Insist On Usability – Even if a site is fast and accommodates multiple platforms, it can still fall flat if customers find it hard to navigate or some key element simply doesn’t work. Paying attention to usability and mobile specific functionality can lead to higher customer satisfaction levels, and this translates directly to an increased return on investment and, hopefully, a profitable and growing business.

Build-in Scalability – The ability to handle sudden and/or seasonal spikes in demand for holiday seasons is the most important use case for e-commerce websites. The solution supports this use case using cloud infrastructure to make your infrastructure feel virtually unlimited – a must have in today’s business world.

Good news is that today, a lot of Indian e-commerce firms are ready to invest a major chunk of the funds on improving the back-end systems. While m-commerce is evolving, online outfits are focusing on improving their mobile content, navigation and interfaces to make purchases more convenient and engaging on the mobile apps. In a nutshell, technology is truly the backbone for exceptional customer experience, leading to successful m-commerce business. A reliable solution will keep the m-commerce platform running optimally without the need to over-provision or constantly re-architect the application. Picking the right hosting partner would mean having this done on their behalf at a far lower cost than hiring and running their own teams while freeing up time to focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Some of the leading cloud technology providers, specifically in the managed cloud segment, are already on the case, offering resources, advice, support and attractive commercial terms that can make the difference between being a modest e-commerce player or a bona fide m-commerce mogul. The blistering pace of growth in m-commerce will continue in India. Companies have realized that the mobile may soon become the most important way to talk to customers. Hence, companies should focus on developing a sound mobile-first strategy for exceptional customer experience, the first and foremost important step of which is the process of choosing the apt cloud solution.