Early yesterday Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research presented findings from a survey of consumer viewpoints on mobile that will be released soon.  She indicated that 'the writing may be on the wall, but the end state is still far away'. Although we've seen countless stats on the growth of mobile, surveys so far have indicated that 'shopping is 10th on the list of what consumers are doing on their phone and traffic is still modest, on average it's about 3%'. This is not unlike stats we heard just a few years ago indicating †hat web internet sales (although growing in the double digits), was still less than 2% of total comp store sales. I'm not sure if her intention was to advise retailers to be weary of mobile commerce but subsequent presentations indicated that some things are hard to derive from pure factual numbers.  

As I mentioned in my blog post yesterday, consumers and retailers 'reaaally want to do mobile.'   Will Pinell, Director of Mobile Strategy of Sabre Holdings, parent company of Travelocity, presented the following: 

Hung Le Hong - Research Vice President Gartner, made an important point about learned behavior.  This was illustrated by an example where Tesco included coupons in mail campaigns to their frequent customers. While some argued that this strategy gave discounts to customers who were already going to purchase and thus only reduced their margin, what Tesco was doing was teaching their customers to open their mail.  Hung went on to quote findings that there is interest in using the mobile phone to check in store stock (7%), check prices (8%), find product locations (5%), but Gartner expects this to grow.

Tim McCadney, Director of Mobile Commerce, Walgreens, opened this mornings keynote with a slide of mobile devices (various smart phones and the iPad) that Walgreens is currently working with and stated enthusiastically, 'How often do you get the opportunity to work with technology like this?' Clearly mobile growth is undeniable.  The element of fun and excitement of the channel by consumers, vendors and retailers will clearly drive innovation as well as change user behavior and expectation. As Will Pinell, Sabre Holdings stated, 'Shopping is Shifting' and finally as summed up by Jacob Sharony, Mobius Consulting, 'We haven't seen nothing yet!'