HSN iPhone mobile commerce application featuring shake2shop

Mobile Commerce is starting be, well… commerce. Home Shopping Network (HSN) announced their new iPhone application that among other things let’s you buy stuff.

So far much of the hype around mobile commerce and mobile advertising has brought back painful memories of the Dot-com days before the bust. Back then it seemed everyone built their business model on ad revenue and the glory of first mover advantage. Today’s conversations on mobile ad revenue and “stickier”, more loyal customers seems to be the same deja vu all over again.

Now we have another great example of a company using their ecommerce expertise to find another way to connect with their consumers and convert eyeballs into revenue. Hallelujah.

Modern consumers use their phone when they’re bored. Look around. Almost everywhere you’ll find someone staring at their phone: in the breakroom, at the DMV, waiting for a plane, sitting on a bus, even standing in line at the checkout. There are lots of places without computers and that are not your retail store. All these other places are opportunities to connect with your customer and create new sales.

“This is another valuable tool for us to reach both existing and new customers with the compelling lifestyle content we offer via HSN TV as well as the broad array of quality products available at hsn.com,” says Brian Bradley, executive vice president/general manager of online and advanced services at HSN. HSN points out that this is possibly the first case of a Live Video “Third Screen”, referring to simultaneous live video on television, computers and now mobile phones.

However, the focus on booking sales in the mobile channel is arguably far more important to the overall mobile commerce industry.

Ecommerce companies are struggling with how best to adapt the web shopping cart metaphor to mobile commerce. Doing business on mobile phones adds additional difficulty because of the fragmentation of technologies (like SMS, browsers & applications) and devices (iPhone, Android, etc.). The successes and failures of the HSN application and others like it will be useful to the industry as a whole.

Industry best practices are still in the incubation stage. Organizations going it alone generally must figure out all the details using trial and error and often with very little objective data or mobile experience as a guide.

This challenge is why more organizations will seek help from outside experts like my firm Mobile Strategy Partners. At least for now, Mobile Commerce is more complicated than ecommerce was in the 1990s. As a veteran of ecommerce and now mobile commerce, I have seen the organizational struggles and the expensive mistakes that could have been prevented.

Mobile Commerce is evolving faster than ecommerce did. More and more organizations are looking for help in getting the product mix right earlier and get to ROI faster.

They’re doing it because if they don’t, their competitors will.

I went home this weekend for my high school reunion in Central Kentucky. It was a blast. I think all the predictable sitcom reunion situations — both drama and comedy — occurred, but this time in real life.

As would be expected, everyone showed pictures of their children. However, I don’t recall a single person actually pulling a paper picture from their purse or wallet. Everyone showed pictures using their phone. Of course lots of people also took pictures using their phone.

As in high school, we all have ended up in different socio-economic levels. Some of us went to college, some of us didn’t. Some of us moved away, some of us stayed. I suspect there are wide variations in income. However, mobile phones are a key part of all our lives and contain some of the most precious information we have.

This is where the value of mobile lies. People have much more intimate relationships with their phones and phones are with people wherever they go. People can count on having their phone with them whenever they need something, and increasingly we can count on the phone to be aware of where the phone and its owner are at any given time.

Organizations that figure out how these new layers of context fit in with their product and their consumers’ lives will profit from mobile. Organizations that put out a mobile web site because it’s cheap and easy, very likely will not.

It’s not that mobile web sites don’t have value. They do. However, having a mobile web site is just the first step toward mobility, not the end-game. Mobile web sites ensure that, with a bit of work, almost anyone can reach your information when they really need it. In most cases, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy or something they enjoy doing over and over.

Organizations have to find ways for consumers to instantaneously connect their lives with your products when they whip out their phone on a whim. The benefits of this are numerous: better brand perception, better brand awareness, better word-of-mouth, more customer loyalty. In many cases, this connection can be a sales or advertising opportunity that increases revenue and/or adds customers.

Throwing together a small copy of your website that fits the dimensions of any phone is not a mobile strategy. It’s a part of your implementation.