At eTail in Baltimore today, Abhi Dhar, CTO Walgreens provoked the crowd saying, “Consumers have changed because of mobile. Deal with it.”

[...]Retailer after retailer asked the question, “Should I do mobile web or native apps?” It was deja vu all over again. It’s the same debate mobile bankers had early last year. Abhi Dahl said “BOTH are very important.” I agree.

In mobile banking, we’ve found that banks must offer all three technologies: Mobile web, SMS, and native applications. Many retailers are still resisting hoping to avoid the fragmentation bankers have resigned themselves to.

David Siegel of 1-800-FLOWERS said, “Don’t try to change customer behavior, market to where they are.”

Customers look for brands using their mobile browser. Retailers should have a mobile site. Customers look for brands in their phone’s app store. Brands should have an app.

Companies resisting building a strategy addressing channel fragmentation are just wasting time and ceding market share to their competitors. Many retailers, including 1-800-FLOWERS said that mobile web accounted for over half their mobile sales. The many mobile web proponents I spoke with seemed to consider this evidence that mobile web is the “right” way to do mobile.

My opinion on this stat is that companies only offering mobile web are potentially missing out on 50% of mobile sales. Maybe these users would buy on mobile web if the native app weren’t available. Maybe. Remember, Apple had to create the App Store in response to overwhelming jailbreaking of the iPhone because Apple insisted mobile web was all we needed.

[...]As Jeff Dennes of USAA said, “If you don’t have enough [mobile] budget, get a bigger budget.”

Now is the time for companies to aggressively commit to mobile and emerge the market leader.

Customers are making decisions using their mobile phone. It’s up to retailers to decide to serve their customers.

Buying and selling tickets is another business that’s slowly being migrated over to our mobile devices. Whether it’s a movie ticket, concert ticket, plane ticket, or something else, there are a number of companies now offering digital alternatives to the tree-killing paper printouts of days past. In a new study by Juniper Research, analysts predict that the market for mobile ticketing will reach 15 billion delivered tickets by the year 2014. According to Juniper, a little over 2 billion tickets were sold this past year. That makes the forecast of 15 billion by 2014 a notable jump which points to consumers’ ever-increasing desire to perform business transactions like mobile ticket purchases using their mobile phones and other handheld devices.

From Tnooz:

The annual Cybersource UK Online Fraud Report, which surveys both companies and consumers, inevitably focused on website-based issues – a third of online merchants seeing an increase in business lost to fraud – but threw in the nugget of negativity on one of its last pages.Responses to the question “Would you use your mobile to purchase online?” were as follows:

• 78% – No, never.
• 8% – Yes, would consider it.
• 4% – Yes, would definitely.
• 10% – Do not own a mobile.

From EMarketer (via PhoCusWright):

Coupon usage was up in 2009 overall, and mobile coupon redemption is poised to explode over the next few years. But mobile couponing is still in the early stages of adoption, as indicated in a Honeywell survey conducted by Harris Interactive in December 2009.

Just 4% of Internet users surveyed said they had redeemed mobile coupons, compared with 86% who had clipped paper coupons and 65% who had used electronic coupons from the Internet or e-mail. Younger adults were most interested in mobile coupons, with 66% saying they were at least somewhat likely to try them.

Most Web users, however, were not yet ready to join the bandwagon. Only 10% felt comfortable storing coupons on their mobile phone rather than printing them out, and one-half that number wanted retailers to text them about deals and sales. Across the board, younger respondents and those with higher incomes had more positive attitudes toward mobile coupon use.

Go figure. Our take is here on Tnooz – we’re at the early adopter stage, when everyone starts using it, everyone will start using it! With regards to mobile coupons, I assume the issue is convenience at this point: the coupons aren’t where we need them to be when we’re at the point-of-sale.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

Here’s an interesting report – Smartphone Owners Now Spending More from Handset, but Poor Site Functionality Is a Turn-off (all emphasis added by us):

Key findings from Compete’s Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey include:

• 37 percent of smartphone owners have purchased something non-mobile with their handset in the past 6 months.
• 19 percent of total smartphone owners have purchased music from their device, 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
• The most popular mobile shopping-related activities are still research related – 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users are most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones while they are shopping.
• The second most likely activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners investigating reviews from their handset before they purchase.

While m-commerce is poised for explosive growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of e-commerce. Compete’s Q3 Smartphone Intelligence survey found that eight percent of smartphone owners that tried to purchase a product on their device were unable to do so. 45 percent of those that abandoned the process reported that they did so because the site would not load, and an additional 38 percent left the site because it was not developed specifically for smartphone users.

That is grim and probably totally unnecessary – purchasing products from your mobile tourism product should be as simple as buying music in iTunes. If you’re doing something interesting in this space, we’d like to hear from you.

Link via David Eads.