Has this ever happened to you? I was standing in a Big Box store waiting for someone to get an item down from one of those high top shelves and take my money. I had already made the decision to purchase the item. An exasperated employee came by and I asked him if he could get the item off of the shelf and ring me out. He let me know that he wasn’t really sure where the ladder was, but even if he did, he could not take my money. "They don’t let me use the cash register,” he declared. When I asked if someone else could help me, he told me that they were short handed that day and everyone else was on break. He asked that I come back on another day.

What do you think I did in this scenario:

1. Took his suggestion and came back on a day when the store was fully staffed with personnel who knew where they kept the ladder and knew how to run the cash register.
2. Waited until he departed, climbed the shelves to get the item myself and left $3.50 on the counter along with a note letting the manager know I had discounted the item by $50 to cover my wages and benefits for serving myself.
3. Crossed the street to the other Big Box store and bought the item there.

Of course the answer is C. I simply went to another store immediately after my encounter with the Big Box employee and made my purchase. To most of us, it is incomprehensible that a retail store, whose sole purpose is to sell "stuff,” would make it so hard on a customer to make a sale. Yet that is what happens on many web sites. If you are trying to do e-commerce, you need to examine your web site to make sure the check out and payment process is a smooth and convenient experience. If you make it difficult, let me remind you that it is easier to make a purchase online than it is for me to get in my car, cross the street and purchase my item from another store. You have to think of your web site as a point-of-sale display. Once you have convinced the customer to purchase your product, you need to make it very easy for them to give you their money. Click and send them to your shopping cart. From there, make it clear where they need to click to pay. Give them their payment options, collect the pertinent info, send them an email confirmation and close the sale.

Right now is a good time to examine your check out process because the world of online purchasing is going mobile. For instance, a survey¹ conducted just before last Christmas reported that 59% of consumers planned to use a mobile device of some sort to do their Christmas shopping. The Gen Y demographic surveyed (ages 25-34) said they planned to use their mobile phone to "a great extent” during the shopping season. Here is a rule of thumb that every marketer should stand up and take notice of: the method people use during the Christmas shopping season will impact the expectations people have in making purchases throughout the year. So if your client purchased a book on his iPhone as a Christmas gift for his mother, he will soon expect to purchase your items via his iPhone as well.

The problem is a matter of formatting for the ever-growing list of mobile phones. Androids, iPhones, Blackberries… and this is not taking into account the iPads and tablets. Which device should you build your m-commerce checkout process around? The conventional wisdom might say to format for all of them. However, before you do, you should take a look at the number of mobile device formats that your customers are now using to access your web site. Outside of polling all your customers on their phone of choice, you can more easily get a breakdown of phone formats with your web stats. (If you are not getting web stats, contact your hosting company or your web site development people and ask for it.) For instance, we monitor the page views and visits to our web site. We also look at the mobile device traffic we get as a subset of those page views and visits. Right now, we are getting up to 5% mobile page views per month. The question you need to ask is: at what point does it make sense for you to convert your checkout process to include a mobile friendly transaction? Would you do it for 5% of your current customers? A better question might be; can you afford to lose 5% of your customer sales to a competitor? Another item we look at closely is the type of phone that is being used and the operating system (OS) version of the device. The iPhone is the most popular of the mobile devices looking at our site. In the study I mentioned earlier, it was found that iPhone users made twice as many mobile transactions as did Blackberry users.

If you are selling products online, the day is approaching where you will need to convert your site for mobile transactions. Don’t be the guy who asks your customers to come back on another day when you have made the conversion and are ready for them. By then, they will have already crossed the road.

1. US Mobile Consumer Briefing: Holiday Shopping with Mobile Phones, MMA-Luth October 2010

Are Consumers Really Buying Products on Mobile Devices? By Matt Ferner. Practical ecommerce.com, November 22, 2010

Now's the Time to Think of a Mobile Strategy for Super Bowl 2012, by Niles X. Lichtenstein. Ad Age.com, August 24, 2011.

Shopping bag original graphic by Talaj. Phone photo by Laurent Davoust