For driving customers into stores.
Effectively use of the mobile internet to influence drive to store and the in-store experience is the biggest challenge facing retailers, according to ShopFully CEO, Stefano Portu (pictured below). “While e-commerce is growing, 94% of purchases still happen in physical stores,” he told Appliance Retailer.
“As a consequence of this, the biggest priority of bricks and mortar retailers about digital is not how they develop an e-commerce play on 6% of their revenues, but how they handle the remaining 94% happening in store when most of their customers choose their smartphones as the key touch point for physical shopping.”
The ShopFully smartphone app was launched in Australia in May 2016 and has quickly grown to become one of the top five applications within the shopping category on the app store, Portu said.
It was the first mobile platform to help customers prepare and plan their purchases while driving them into physical stores from the touch of a button on their smartphone.
“We work with electronic retailers the same way we work with any other retailer, aggregate relevant store information, simplify the user experience in locating stores, deals and products, and make it accessible anywhere and everywhere, localised to the user, via a mobile application.”
He said next to grocery, consumer electronics is one of the most read and engaged categories within the ShopFully application. “ShopFully is about helping 30 million consumers plan their shopping experience. For consumer electronics, it becomes even more important as purchases are typically of higher value, involve more research, high need for product comparison, and of course, price. Being able to locate all of this in one application, that is mobile and easy to use, is how we make shopping for consumer electronics a smart experience for users.”
As for Amazon, which Portu acknowledged will have a role to play, the logistics of the local market make it more difficult than most for ecommerce. “But applying a measurement and data driven approach to physical retail through mobile should, in my opinion, be the top priority in the transformation agenda of retailers, because it impacts the core of their business.”