Online retail's slow mobile embrace

eBay has revealed plans to include image-recognition technology in its mobile offerings by the end of the year, which will allow shoppers to take pictures of the things they want and match them up with similar items for sale on eBay.com.

The new service adds to the range of mobile solutions on offer from eBay business PayPal, which already offers barcode scanning, geo-targeted mobile advertising, a virtual wallet, and mobile, and more recently in the US, point-of-sale payments.

It's all part of PayPal's plan to own both the online and on-the-go payments markets.

Once again, Australia's banks and traditional retailers are struggling to catch up.

Australian online retailer RedBalloon has told research group Forrester it's still waiting for Australia's banks to offer a mobile check-out tool that is comparable to PayPal's.

As Forrester's Steven Noble explains in a new report on the technology investments being made by Australian online retailers, while local retailers have lagged in their use of mobile, customers have not. Forrester has found 38 per cent of online retailers now view mobile applications as their technology investment priority for the year ahead.

One in five Australian multichannel retailers surveyed by Forrester in 2011 said they provide a mobile-optimised shopping site, up from eight per cent last year.

Steep learning curve

Emma Cronin, who runs a successful Sydney-based courier company, says it's not through a lack of desire that more online retailers haven't embraced the mobile channel.

“It's been a long journey for some of them that have come from a traditional retail environment to get online in the first place, let alone to get to mobile.

“There's definitely a desire to be there I just think at the moment they're on a steep learning curve and it's going to take some time,” Cronin told Technology Spectator.

Cronin and her sister recently launched a same-day delivery service, Want It Now, that integrates with an online retailer's shopping cart. The service says it's now signing up a new retailer nearly every day, as they seek to provider shoppers with a wider range of delivery options.

While Australia Post and several other commercial courier companies offer similar delivery services, it's the integration with an online retailer's shopping cart that is compelling, and is helping Australian retailers catch up with their offshore counterparts.

“We've had a fantastic response from the smaller guys because it is a chance for them to differentiate from the big guys, and particularly from offshore where they can't compete on price and range, but they can definitely compete on speed,” Cronin says.

Instant gratification

Forrester data shows the average Australian online order value is $339, which means consumers are often more than willing to pay between $15 and $25 for expedited delivery, particularly when compared with the $10-$15 often charged for basic delivery that can take weeks via Australia Post.

In keeping with the theme of instant gratification, Want It Now has itself embraced the mobile channel. It took the parcel tracking and fleet management platform its parent courier company spent millions of dollars and years fine-tuning and turned the information over to end consumers so they can track their item in real-time via a smartphone application.

Rather than tell customers where their parcel is, which is the information the company sees, the application provides a minute-by-minute countdown of when a shopper's parcel is expected to be delivered.

Contrast this with this week's self service-heavy Australia Post parcel revamp, and it's not hard to see which organisation genuinely understands the business of online retail.