Growing Power of Mobile

Not in the mobile space yet? What are you waiting for? That was the underlying message that came out of the Mobile Shopping Summit held in New York City in October. 


Kenneth Cole: “Basically, you have a year to get in the game,” said Tom Davis, VP e-commerce, Kenneth Cole Productions, New York City, in a presentation at the conference. “By 2015, more people will access the Web globally through smartphones than laptops and desktops combined.” 

Davis stressed that for Kenneth Cole and other lifestyle brand retailers, it is critical that all channels — stores, Web site and mobile — offer a consistent brand image. 

“It’s all about the cross-channel experience,” he said. “And that experience should be similar, no matter how anyone touches our brand.” 

Mobile devices are responsible for 10% of Kenneth Cole’s Web traffic, and 4% of the company’s business comes through its commerce-enabled mobile site (as of October). But Davis expects the figures to rise substantially going forward.
“We’re expecting an incredible spike in mobile traffic and sales during the holidays,” he said. “We think that in one year, this form factor will be bigger than some of our standalone stores. This [mobile investment] is an easy business case scenario to make to a CFO.” 

The mobile space is rapidly evolving. One big change to look out for, according to Davis, is the introduction of HTML5 to mobile sites. The new Internet markup language is expected to enable mobile sites to do things that, until now, only mobile apps could do, and result in greatly enhanced site performance. 


 

Steve Madden: Steve Madden is also experiencing rapid growth in its mobile site. In April, 4.4% of the footwear brand’s total online traffic was coming from mobile devices. By the end of October, the figure had risen to 10.5%. The average time spent on Steve Madden’s mobile site is just under 7 mins. 

“In the last six months, we’ve had 880,000 people visit our mobile site,” said Andrew Koven, president, e-commerce and customer experience, Steve Madden, at the Mobile Shopping Summit. “The idea that our mobile site is reaching 10.5% of our total traffic and has had 250% growth in traffic over six months is pretty powerful.”


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