Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger (Part 3)

Kevin Eichelberger: Typically, we’d advise our clients about opportunities to improve the mobile and shopping experience, in particular, the checkout experience. There are two events that happened in 2016 that will create lots of opportunities for brands and retailers to make that process more seamless to an end user. By and large, that will be the opening of Android Pay and Apple Pay for mobile payment methods. Those systems used to only be available if you had a native mobile app. Most people shopping on a mobile device are shopping through mobile web.

In mobile web, you can’t interface with Android or Apple devices to pay with their mobile wallets. You could scan your thumb print and complete the purchase then and there without having this convoluted checkout form. Those just opened up within the last six months. With these opportunities to implement these technologies today, we feel that there is a lot of upside in terms of the number of people that will then complete purchases on mobile devices rather than switching devices.

When someone switches devices, it’s an opportunity to lose them. We want to capture them then and there when they’re engaged. That is one big opportunity that very few retailers have today partly because it just opened up. If I were to invest at one thing this year at improving mobile shopping conversions, that to me would be the top item on the list.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve basically highlighted the problem. I’m still looking for the solution. 

Kevin Eichelberger: Mobile payment methods are the solution to the problem of checkout on mobile devices. That will allow people to check out much easier and with less pain than they have today. Most retailers don’t have mobile payment methods for their websites. The problem is that mobile checkout is painful. The solution is Android Pay and Apple Pay. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has both of those payment methods available that are much more seamless to integrate. In some cases, it requires a little bit more lifting on the technology end to make that happen.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that this is the solution. To what extent have you tested that this is the solution. I’ll be very specific. Are there clients in which you have been able to see metrics of this seriously impacting the conversion rates on mobile?

Kevin Eichelberger: It’s a great question. The reality is that we don’t have great data to support it today because it is very new. There are very few use cases where people have it up and running. In fact, the last one to roll out was Apple Pay. That was in late Q3 2016 so we haven’t had enough time to set it up and measure it. What you’ll see this year are use cases in data and studies to indicate whether or not it is a big solution to that problem.

It could turn out that it’s not. I’m very much in agreement with you in that I want data to validate whether or not that hypothesis is true or false. We don’t yet have data-backed evidence whether that hypothesis is true or false. We are currently implementing this for some of our clients. With its rollout, we’ll be looking to gather that data to help understand whether that is a true hypothesis or not.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Blue Acorn CEO Kevin Eichelberger
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