M-Commerce is Blowin’ Up. Pun Intended.
October 3rd, 2009 Posted in Mobile CommerceGlobal brands are jumping on the M-Commerce bandwagon hoping to boost revenue and draw in new customers with this latest technology. Why should your brand make this move? It’s slick, stable and fun. Simple enough, right?
Wrong.
Because of an ongoing fear of letting a mobile device communicate with POS (Point of Sales) technology, often times, mobile apps do nothing. What does that mean? It’s not easier for customers to make purchases, leading to zero transactions.
Case in point: the Starbucks new mobile apps. Nice to look at, but they are as useless as a dial-up Internet connection.
In September, Starbucks launched two M-Commerce apps designed for the iPhone. One app, called the Starbucks Mobile Card, was on a limited trial and only impacted eight stores in Seattle and eight more around Silicon Valley.
The app allows consumers to enter their Starbucks loyalty card numbers to read card balances and related information. Consumers can also enter a credit or debit card info and add money to the Starbucks CRM card. A customer walking into Starbucks can then show the phone’s screen and allow it to be scanned as payment, instead of using the actual CRM card.
Starbucks Mobile Card is a limited trial, but the ability to access data about the card value is useful–although such data could just as easily be accessed from the chain’s website.
Another question to ask is whether or not forcing a customer to take out their phone and have it scanned is any better than having them do the same thing with a card? Possibly. Consumers do tend to forget loyalty cards, but almost always have their phones. That app is somewhat beneficial.
The real headache is the nationally rolled-out program, MyStarbucks. This iPhone app offers Web repeat functions, such as a listing of products and the associated calories and nutrients. It also finds local Starbucks locations and provides basic information about each of the chain’s 15,700 locations.
The MyStarbucks app allows the customer to select and store a location, as well as create and save favorite drinks. What’s the problem? Well, this is boring. Customers can’t do a thing with this app other than post it to their Facebook or Twitter. Do you really care what your friend’s favorite Starbucks concoction is? Unless it’s going to give you a free drink or discount, probably not.
How does Starbucks solve the problem of an expensive and useless app? Take it to the next level! Let consumers drag their favorite drink to their favorite store, transmitting the data to the store. That will save time waiting in line to place the order and waiting for the order to be made. This idea could have been integrated into the Mobile Card trial, allowing for a complete buy-online/pick-up-in-store experience.
Imagine this: Susie Coffee Fanatic needs her daily dose of caffeine. She chooses one of her favorite drinks and associates it with her store. Then, she uses her newly-funded Starbucks card to pay for it, all from her phone. Susie can even schedule a time on the phone to pick it up. She arrives at a crowded Starbucks at 9:30 in the morning, skips all of the lines – including the cashier – grabs her already-paid-for beverage, and she’s on her merry caffeinated way.
Why did Starbucks come so close to making a potentially amazing app and fall short? Aside from saying that those capabilities will most likely happen in the future, that’s all that I can tell you.
Starbucks isn’t the only brand whose mobile efforts are hesitant to cross the POS boundary. J.C. Penny, for example, started a trial at 16 Houston stores to read coupon barcodes from phones, claiming that at the end of September, they were the first major retailer to go mobile. (While actually, Dick’s Sporting Goods successfully went mobile over Labor Day weekend after launching the world’s largest QR code campaign.)
Back to Starbucks. Making the Starbucks integration actually happen and creating a true buy-online/pick-up-in-store mobile experience requires a deep integration with the POS–which is not something that IT departments generally find comforting, because it involves lengthy testing. And Starbucks has a history of treating the Web as a second-class citizen.
Moral of the story?
Don’t be afraid of POS technology and lengthy testing to launch a mobile app. Especially if it has the potential to be extremely profitable for your company. If there is no call to action with an app, why bother using it?
| Alyssa DiLoreto
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