Cell Phone Shopping Roams into the Future
Do you ever wonder what influences the buying choices you make online? Shopping online has become the choice purchasing vehicle for many people regardless of what they are buying. Next time you are shopping for the latest tech gadget or fashion trend, take some time to notice how your favorite sites are designed. Good website design and functionality definitely affect buyer’s decisions to purchase from specific sites but will that same functionality translate to shopping while surfing the web on your cell phone?
Yahoo has launched Shopping Search for Mobile for cell phone subscribers, which allows consumers to compare product prices from their mobile phones. Ben Strong, Senior Product Manager for Yahoo! Shopping, writes on the Yahoo! Search Blog that the Yahoo’s service “allows you to price compare product prices from your mobile phone, accessing our database of millions of offers. Simply enter http://shopping.yahoo.com into your WAP 2.0-enabled browser, search for a product, and start comparing. Check your phone’s user manual to see if it’s WAP 2.0-enabled.” MSN and America Online have launched similar services for cell phone subscribers.
Until online retailers catch up with cell phone web surfing technology, consumers can only compare products from their mobile phones and will still have to rely on their computers to purchase products. Furthermore, retailers and the companies, such as Yahoo, that provide the shopping service have a pretty serious obstacle to overcome. Cell phone screens are tiny and online retailers have to make versions of their websites that fit on the tiny cell phone screens.
But, once online retailers develop their sites, the implications for online advertising are tremendous. Marketers will have yet another vehicle in which to reach audiences as they use their cell phones to shop online. Because consumers are already comfortable with shopping online from their computers, there shouldn’t be much of an adjustment time to shopping via the web on their cell phones.
My advice for advertisers who hope to jump on the cell phone shopping band wagon is to make sure your ads are compatible with the online retailer websites that are created specifically for the smaller cell phone screens. That way, your ad creative will be sure to reach the shopping obsessed who must have the Internet at their immediate disposal to get their purchasing fix.
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