Students Consider Tech Tools for Shopping

Many college students are shopping at mainstream retailers with mobile apps and they’d like to use similar apps at their campus bookstore, according to a September 2016 student survey conducted by NACS OnCampus Research. However, they’re not as familiar with other shopping aids, such as chatbots and online check-in.

In the 90 days prior to the survey, 34% of students had used a store app and cited mobile coupons, ease of use, and quick loading as the aspects they liked most. Students also appreciated being able to determine whether certain items were in stock and to read product reviews.

Two-thirds expressed interest in an app offered by their campus bookstore, especially if they received a discount for downloading the app, earned instant coupons when they entered the store, or had the ability to check on prices for selling back used textbooks.

Only 3% of students had taken advantage of a chatbot to interact with a store online in real time while 11% had used chatbots in other circumstances. Stores that offer this feature need to promote it, as more than 60% of students confessed they didn’t know what a chatbot was.

Students had more experience with online check-in, which provides a text message or other notification to alert customers when it’s their turn for service, instead of waiting in a physical line. About 23% had used online check-in while 42% indicated interest in trying it out.

Students Shop on Phone or Laptop, Not Tablet

College students prefer to shop online from their laptop or smartphone, rather than using a tablet or other computerized device.

In a new student panel survey from NACS OnCampus Research, 82.5% of respondents said they had shopped on their laptop at least once in the preceding 90 days. On average, they made 3.2 purchases via the laptop.

More than 70% indicated they shopped on their smartphone during the same time period, transacting almost two purchases on the device on average. In contrast, just 29.7% went shopping on a desktop computer, 28.2% on a tablet, 5.2% on a transformer or hybrid device, 2.2% on a netbook, and 1.4% on an e-reader.

Approximately 37.4% of students admitted to browsing for merchandise information or buying something on their phone every single day. Even so, shopping ranked just 11th on the list of 13 daily activities students conduct during the 5.2 hours they average on their phones. Topping that list, not unexpectedly, was text messaging (96%), searching the Internet (89.3%), accessing email (89.2%), social networking (80.7%), and phone calls (78.6%).

At the bottom of the list were video messages (11.4%) and reading books, magazines, and other materials (17.2%).

The survey also showed that many students don’t regard certain small electronics to be “mobile.” Nearly all students consider a smartphone to be mobile and 63.2% would apply that term to tablets. However, fewer than half of students think of iPods, laptops, e-readers, hybrid devices, and netbooks as mobile—possibly because they don’t use these devices away from home, unlike phones and tablets. Educators, marketers, retailers, and others who refer to “mobile” devices in discussions and promotions might want to clarify that for a student audience.

Facial Recognition to Become Commonplace

The use of facial-recognition software is about to become much more widespread. MasterCard is set to launch a pilot using the technology, while a new report predicted the number of devices with facial-recognition software will rise from 28.5 million in 2015 to more than 122 million by 2024.

The marketing intelligence research firm Tractica also expects the annual revenue for facial biometrics to grow by 22% annually, to more than $880 million over the next nine years, according to a report in VentureBeat.

“Adoption of facial recognition will be particularly strong during the next several years in mobile-device authentication, but areas of growth will also include government applications, such as national ID cards and biometrics passports, as well as finance/banking and retail applications,” the authors of the report wrote.

The MasterCard pilot is aimed at finding ways for shoppers to use biometric scans or voice recognition to verify their identity for purchases. According to reports, MasterCard is working with several hardware and software companies on the project, along with two banks.

New Google Algorithm's Impact Uncertain

If you noticed a sudden drop in visits to your website in the last couple days, it might be the “Mobilegeddon” effect. All in all, though, many site owners remain oblivious to any impact in traffic as the result of Google’s new search algorithm favoring mobile-friendly sites.

On April 21, Google tweaked the algorithm to give more weight in search results rankings to sites with mobile-compatible navigation. Google announced two months ago that it would be making the change and provided developer tools to help site owners determine if alterations were needed.

The date was dubbed Mobilegeddon in the tech press due to the potential hit some sites might take.

According to the Greenlight digital marketing agency, the first link in search rankings usually gets about 20%-30% of all clicks on the page. The second and third links receive 5%-10%, and the rest yield 1% or less. For organizations that rely on search traffic, a lower berth in the rankings might cost them a lot of business. In early April, TechCrunch found 44% of all Fortune 500 company sites failed Google’s mobile test.

The up side for websites is that only searches conducted on smartphones are subject to the new algorithm. Searches via desktop or tablet will produce the same results as before, at least for now. Google clearly thinks web searching is becoming a mobile thing.

To enhance your site’s mobile friendliness, Search Engine Land offers some recommendations.

Retailers Pick Mobile Sites over Apps

The cost of developing a mobile app for shoppers is prompting many retailers to opt for a cheaper, albeit less personal, alternative: building a mobile-optimized e-commerce website.

A new study by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Forrester Research, as reported by CNBC, indicated that 58% of retail companies are placing a high priority on mobile commerce this year but they’re balking at the expense. For a national retail chain, that might top $2 million in development fees, not to mention the costs to market the app to consumers.

A campus bookstore could get a decent app for much less, maybe four figures, but that would still represent a fairly large piece of the budget for such a store.

Retail apps do boost online sales—possibly as much as 30% for some merchants—and help strengthen customer loyalty to the store, according to the NRF/Forrester study, although the bump may not compensate for the yearly maintenance and upgrade costs.

The majority of shoppers are using apps to determine if sellers have certain merchandise on hand. A mobile-friendly website, if designed correctly, can provide the same information to consumers.

P-Commerce Lets Local Stores Back in Game

Smartphones may prove to be an Achilles’ heel for Amazon, in the view of a columnist for The New York Times. At the same time, smartphones might be a lifeline for local retailers, including those on or near college campuses.

“Like many of the local and big-box retailers it has displaced over the last decade and a half, Amazon could itself become increasingly vulnerable to the threat of technological upheaval,” wrote Farhad Manjoo.

The “upheaval” is the rapidly rising trend of shopping by phone. Obviously, consumers have been able to shop online from their computers for a couple decades now, but the ubiquity of smartphones means a lot of people have fast, private access to e-commerce all the time, no matter where they are.

The thing is, Manjoo noted, all those phone shoppers aren’t necessarily going to Amazon. Physical retail chains, as well as local mom-and-pop stores, have ramped up their website features, added more merchandise, and trimmed their prices.

They’ve also plugged into ordering and courier services such as Postmates and Instacart. Consumers can just as easily browse and purchase from local merchants, often with same-day delivery or pickup, as they can with Amazon.

“None of these technologies pose an existential threat to Amazon, but by giving physical stores some of the conveniences that Amazon has long had, they may limit its potential reach,” Manjoo said.

Millennials Say Get Mobile or Get Out

Millennials want to use their smartphones for pretty much everything, and they’re starting to look askance at any organization that doesn’t accommodate their mobile needs.

According to a new survey from research company Zogby Analytics and image software provider Mitek, more than a third of millennials have already made a purchase or selected a brand on the basis of the company’s mobile capabilities and almost half interact daily with at least one retail mobile site.

Most respondents indicated retailers ought to offer robust mobile-commerce apps to their customers. About 42% are still willing to shop with retailers that don’t provide an app or mobile-optimized site “but they are likely to complain and feel negatively about it,” said a Mobile Marketer report on the survey. “Fourteen percent claim to avoid businesses that do not offer mobile capability.”

Millennials, the age group dominating college and university enrollment at present, also feel they should be able to use their smartphones’ image-capturing technology to auto-populate electronic forms, such as registering for classes or signing up for an online store’s membership program.

“Institutions must adopt a new way of communicating and interacting or they will be left behind,” said Jim Debello, CEO of Mitek.

Barriers Put Skids on Retail Apps

For a time, the retail industry was gung-ho for mobile apps. Every merchant had to develop an app for shoppers to download so that the store and customer could remain in constant touch.

Some retailers may be cooling on that idea, which is possibly good news for campus stores that didn’t have the budget to build a custom app anyway. According to Mobile Commerce Daily, many attendees at the eTail East 2014 conference in early August thought developing mobile websites made more sense.

While apps are able to provide greater functionality and are easier for customers to use once downloaded, they typically cost more to create, partly because each platform (iOS, iPhone, Android, Windows) calls for its own app. Retailers also have to constantly market the availability of the app and worry whether customers are using it successfully.

“Research has shown that approximately 70% of users lose faith in a brand if an app frustrates them, and one in five apps is only ever used one time,” Joel Evans, vice president of mobile enablement at Mobiquity, told Mobile Commerce Daily.

On the other hand, responsive design allows mobile websites to shapeshift to accommodate most devices. The investment to develop such sites is much lower, and a big bonus is that mobile sites will pop up in search results. Some retailers are opting to put their money into responsive design, at least until it’s easier and cheaper to create apps.

Mobile Payments May Ramp Up Sooner

Of all the new technologies that higher education administrators need to monitor, mobile payment is probably fairly far down the list. However, Business News Daily identified five trends indicating mobile-payment systems are heading into the mainstream.

Although some forms of mobile payment have been somewhat slower to take root—near field communication (NFC), for instance—there has been much more rampant growth in others, such as smartphones. Any organizations that must deal with consumer transactions, including colleges and universities, will have to keep an eye on how smartphone payments play out.

Even NFC is expected to become more common, once consumers get over their worries about privacy, because it is fundamentally easier to use. Payment apps will move to the cloud, allowing for greater customization of services, while stronger security and data protection will be put in place, an aspect of mobile payments of particular concern to campuses.

“As such, security will continue to improve and integrate both technology and personal validation measures,” the article says.

Although Amazon is rumored to be launching a mobile-payment reader soon, Business News Daily doesn’t think the retail behemoth will be able to gain a toehold in that space, given the more-established competitors and the mixed reaction to Amazon’s new phone.

Shoppers Start on Desktop, Move to Mobile

Mobile shoppers seem to take a try-before-you-buy approach, according to the findings of a new study on m-commerce.

According to the MobileShopTalk blog on MediaPost, the latest Custora E-Commerce Pulse survey found that 76% of online consumers still use only a desktop computer to make their purchases, with the rest shopping on a mobile device or a combination of devices.

“One of the interesting insights in the study is that once consumers trust a retailer after their first desktop transaction, they’re more willing to make repeat purchases on a mobile device,” said blogger Chuck Martin.

Also something of a surprise were the ways that consumers shop on their smartphones. Survey results showed that 27% of purchases via smartphones were prompted by email promotions. Another 33% were derived from shoppers who went straight to a specific retailer’s m-commerce site.

The Custora survey estimates mobile commerce may reach $50 billion by the end of 2014. Compare that to the puny $2 billion mobile market back in 2010.

App Allows Mobile Users to Avoid Ads

It took more than a century for telephone consumers to get the Do Not Call registry to opt out of unwanted calls from marketers and salespeople. Far less time has elapsed for the debut of an app that allows consumers to opt out of targeted mobile ads.

At its annual conference in San Francisco in late June, the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) introduced its new AppChoices app, which will enable people to just say no to receiving targeted ads on their mobile devices.

“The app will prevent people from seeing ads that are targeted based on the apps they use, the mobile equivalent of online behavioral targeting (which segments audiences based on the types of web content they view),” according to an article in Advertising Age. Those ads sport a small, blue, triangle-shaped icon in the corner.

The app doesn’t interfere with any mobile data collection based on the device’s location, just the receipt of ads. Right now the DAA is making it available to the advertising industry for evaluation and comment, but expects to roll it out to the public sometime this fall.

Assuming consumers latch onto AppChoices in droves like they did with Do Not Call, such an app could impact the marketing efforts of retailers trying to reach certain demographics through mobile media. Colleges and universities could also be hampered in recruiting enrollees, especially as more students turn away from other media channels in favor of mobile.

Students Are Leary of Mobile Payments

A new study found that college students are still not sure about mobile payments. The April survey from Balance Innovations showed that 42% of the 2,503 students who responded would “probably not” or would “definitely not” use mobile payments.

Another 42% said that using mobile payments would depend on the retailer or purchase, while just 16% said they use mobile payments all the time.

“Because they are frontrunners of technology and avid smartphone users, we anticipated higher interest in the use of mobile payment among these 18- to 24-year-olds,” said Steve Rempel, president and CEO of Balance Innovations.

The survey also found that 21% of men said they would likely switch to mobile payments when they become widely available, compared to just 12% of the female students who responded. Students with majors such as accounting or business administration were more likely to use mobile payments, while students in the Midwest were less likely to use their phones to pay for purchases than students on either coast.

Don't Track Me by Phone, Shoppers Say

Lots of people possess smartphones and use mobile apps for a variety of purposes, but that doesn’t mean they’re altogether comfortable with shopping apps that track their whereabouts and text promotional messages.

This type of app has been touted as the next big thing for retailers, as it allows them to follow customers while they shop and tempt them with offers if they’re nearby. However, a survey of 3,000 mobile app users indicates shoppers are a little creeped out by that prospect.

More than 71% of respondents said they don’t want merchants to track them via smartphone. They were a little more receptive to getting push notifications with special offers—only 56% overall were against such messages, although more Apple iOS users than others were willing to receive them. Even so, most of the survey takers didn’t know anything about Apple’s new iBeacon technology, which enables retailers to send notifications to customers while they’re in the physical store.

Despite considerable news coverage of near field communications technology, only 38% of respondents were familiar with it and fewer than 6% actually use it for contactless payments.

The survey was conducted by a company, Retale, that may have reason to be pleased by the results. Retale helps participating retailers get their traditional sales circulars—the kind typically inserted in print newspapers or mailed directly to homes—into shoppers’ hands by aggregating them online by geographical location.

M-Commerce a Hit with College Students

College students like the speed and convenience of mobile commerce, and are coming to expect it at retail establishments, if the experience of the Alvin Community College Store, Alvin, TX, is any indication.

After Manager Victoria Marvel added a mobile solution to her store’s point-of-sale system in order to facilitate remote sales at events such as ACC baseball games, she didn’t need to do much training with her student employees. When she showed them the handheld checkout device, “our student workers just grabbed it out of my hand and wanted to play around with it,” she said during her educational presentation on Go to Your Students: Mobile Commerce at CAMEX 2014 in Dallas, TX.

Her student customers were equally excited. These days, with students preferring not to carry around much cash, they were thrilled to be able to buy spirit merchandise at games with their debit or credit card.

“Students absolutely love it,” Marvel said. To complete the sale, all she has to do is scan the bar code on the product tag, swipe the customer’s card, and find out if they want a receipt.

She can print out a paper receipt from the mobile device, or email a digital version to students if they prefer. “They don’t really care about receipts,” Marvel commented, “but probably 20% to 30% have it come to email.”

CAMEX Digs into Tech, Content, Commerce

College and university campuses are possibly the only places where consumer technologies, higher learning, new media, electronic and mobile commerce, libraries, retail technologies, and digital content intersect. Educational sessions coming up March 7-8 at the 2014 Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) in Dallas, TX, will address just about all of those areas.

Among the presenters for the Thought Leader series will be Charles Key, director of adoptions, grants, and the College Open Textbooks project for the Open DoorsGroup in San Jose, CA, a coalition of organizations working together to make education more accessible, and Mark Milliron, chancellor of the WesternGovernors University-Texas, a nonprofit institution providing online and blended degree programs.

Key will address Open Educational Resources and the Economies of Sale on Friday morning while Milliron’s Saturday session will discuss Technology, Education, and the Road Ahead.

Concurrent CAMEX educational sessions will explore new retail technologies for campus textbook sellers, how campus stores can work with other entities to support student retention and success, updates on the Higher Education Act and Department of Education regulations, how faculty and students are using technology for their studies, digital content pilots on college campuses, mobile commerce developments, connecting with students through social media, trends in higher education course materials, and integrating e-commerce and digital content platforms.

Flash Sessions (shorter takes on topics) will look at how campus stores can support student learning outcomes, helping students understand interactive digital homework solutions, selling textbooks online, using Google Analytics to track web traffic, what technology products students are buying, licensing course content, and where massive open online courses (MOOCs) could be headed.

Watch The CITE for reports from several of these sessions.

Following the session days, CAMEX will continue March 9-11 with its trade show for retailers serving students at higher education institutions and prep schools. CAMEX is owned and produced by the National Association of College Stores.

Bigger is Better, Say Mobile Shoppers

Given the choice, many people would rather view a full-sized e-commerce site on their smartphone or tablet than a mobile-optimized version scaled to the smaller screen.

Bill Siwicki, a managing editor at Internet Retailer, comments that he discovered this bit of counterintuitive intelligence by chance. He was browsing an e-commerce site on his phone when a pop-up offered to switch to the mobile site. His response: “Of course I want your mobile commerce web site on my iPhone. I don’t want to have to pinch and zoom and swipe like mad to try to make sense of the huge desktop site on my small smartphone screen. Are you crazy?”

That’s not the response most users give, however. Siwicki found that a new study conducted last October by Retail Systems Research shows more than half of consumers bypass mobile e-commerce sites to view the full site on their mobile device. The study didn’t specifically ask consumers why they do this, but an analyst with the research company told Siwicki that it’s probably because too many mobile sites have been overly simplified, leaving out too many features and content that visitors want to access.

Another reason may be that some consumers are more familiar with the full site and know just where to go with minimal zooming and swiping on a mobile device.

Either way, it indicates that many online retailers “who believe they have great mobile sites actually have more work to do to make shopping mobile-optimized sites on smartphones more appealing,” Siwicki writes.

Facebook Testing Mobile Payments

Facebook is testing a mobile payment platform that will let users pay for online purchases by logging in with their Facebook credentials. The platform is being developed as an in-house project for the social media giant.

The biggest obstacle facing the project is users’ distrust, Denee Carrington, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, told Information Week. Her research found that just 4% of U.S. consumers trust Facebook with a mobile digital wallet.

After it addresses privacy and security concerns, Facebook will need to focus on user experience, according to Jordan McKee of the research firm Yankee Group.

“Since Facebook profits from user data, the concept of offering payment credentials in addition to personal information may not sit well with many,” he said. “Facebook must also put tremendous emphasis on the user experience. If they don’t find Facebook’s offering to be intuitive, easy, and seamless, it will gain little traction and potentially dilute its brand.”

Follett Higher Ed Testing M-Commerce

By their very nature, campus stores attract a younger crowd that uses smartphones. That fact has Follett Higher Education Group actively testing its mobile marketing ability and plans.

Follett test have indicated more than 60% of recipients of special offers delivered by text message during a slow sales period viewed details of the offer, and 9% redeemed the coupon. In addition, fewer than 1% opted out of receiving the text, according to Leeann Fecho, manager of emerging media and loyalty marketing at Follett.

The company also developed a program that created a unique personal identification number that links a customer to a transaction when redeemed with a coupon and a program that allows shoppers to simply wave their mobile phones at an in-store kiosk to retrieve coupon offers.

“Mobile presents unique opportunities to connect and consolidate the customer experience,” Fecho told a session at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2013. “The value of mobile isn’t just about building offers or mobile commerce—it’s all of that, but while doing that and blending the in-store and online experience.”

Device Divide Tips Commerce to Phones

Laptops are from Mars, smartphones are from Venus. Or to put it another way, computers are for school and work tasks, while smartphones are for leisure and socializing.

At least that’s the way young people see it. Shopping falls in the smartphone bucket, by the way.

In a post for Internet Retailer, writer Amy Dusto describes how she came to realize that she and her husband, both in their 20s, were differentiating the use of their electronic devices. This one for work, that one for fun.

Then the point was driven home for Dusto by the 17-year-old son of a business colleague. The boy left his laptop, where he’d been doing homework, to walk across the room to pick up his cellphone and make a clothing purchase. He was dismissive when an adult suggested he could have made the transaction right from the laptop.

Another Internet Retailer commentator, Bill Siwicki, points to data from an IDC survey in March showing that smartphone owners aged 18-44 spend 84% of their phone usage time doing everything but making calls. NACS OnCampus Research, in its latest Student Watch survey of college students, discovered similar findings.

A lot of that phone time is devoted to shopping, whether that involves checking e-mail or texts for special offers, researching products or sellers online, scanning QR codes for information, reading or posting personal reviews on social media, or actually placing orders. Siwicki’s point is that retailers need to understand this behavior and make sure their e-commerce operations can handle mobile shopping.

It’s still unclear whether the younger crowd views tablets as small computers or large phones. Maybe that’s yet to shake out.

Window Shopping Goes High-Tech

Digital services agency United Future has developed a system that turns a retailer’s storefront into an interactive, touchscreen shopping experience. The company believes the technology will attract more customers, particularly tech-savvy ones such as college students, and increase sales.

The system uses a touch-sensitive film attached to the storefront glass, along with a projector and laptop. The touchscreen display can be customized for each retailer, who can change information displayed on an hourly basis if they choose.

The shopper uses the window touchscreen to drag and drop apparel items onto mannequins sized to fit their personal measurements. Customers can then complete a purchase through QR codes linked to secure store web sites. United Future is trying to enhance the system to enable payments using a smartphone by tapping on the glass.

“Our product extends the shelf by helping educate the consumer and bringing the retail floor to life,” Scott Holmes, president of United Futures, said in an article for a National Retail Federation publication. “That, to me, is the future of where retail is headed: toward more experiential shopping. We must connect across all retail channels to succeed in the future.”