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.

There’s a balancing act going on in mobile development around how much should be in a single mobile application.

Whether an app is built as a native app, browser-based or even using SMS, a fundamental decision has to be made about what goes into a single app. So far there doesn’t appear to be consensus as to where exactly to draw the line.

There’s a natural tendency for organizations to want to put all of their capabilities into a single application. We do that on our websites and in our physical locations. For example, an airline website lets you get to all aspects of the airline from booking a ticket, to managing rewards, to investing in the company. Likewise, if you walk into a bank branch you can get all kinds of information about the parent financial services company from money markets, to business banking, investments and sometimes even insurance.

However mobile applications are bite-sized by nature. We use mobile while walking down the street, waiting for the plane to take off, and while bouncing around in a car (hopefully while riding, not driving). I haven’t heard many people wish for Microsoft Word-sized applications that contain all the features engineers have dreamed up over a few decades.  Even though devices are approaching the technical ability to manage such large applications, can we find ways to make large, disparate useful in the mobile context?

For now, I think organizations need to carefully explore their plans for mobile apps and make decisions on a case-by-case basis. As with anything, answers for one organization may not be right for another.

This decision is shaping up to be more complex than either 2oth century packaged software issues or 21st century web application decisions. Mobile blurs the lines and requires a forward-looking product strategy in a rapidly changing market and requires low-impact ways to provide new offerings without inconveniencing or confusing users.