As mobile becomes a critical component of your digital strategy and overall business, eBusiness professionals should have an answer when their executive teams ask, “Who does mobile commerce well?” Forrester has answered that question for you in our new report published today.  Using a proprietary framework, we analyzed top retailers’ mobile experiences (sites and apps) and measured how well they addressed key challenges to mobile commerce sales and supported mobile-enabled commerce in other channels. We selected the best of the best for our review to highlight the strongest functionality and uncover cross-category best practices.

Our framework evaluates the strengths of these mobile phone websites and their corresponding apps across six elements:

  • Findability. The ease of finding a mobile site or app altogether.
  • Utility. How useful the site or app is for shoppers.
  • Searchability. How well search and search functionality like predictive text works on mobile phones.
  • Browsability. How easy it is to browse the retailer’s mobile site or app.
  • Buyability. How easy and frictionless the buying process is on the mobile site or app.
  • Overall design. The ease of navigating content on mobile sites and apps, as well as other mobile content that shoppers engage with including email and text messages.

The results?  As expected, there were many strong, innovative experiences.  Some highlights of the findings include flash sale sites like Groupon and Gilt, who deliver simple yet high utility to shoppers, delightful browsability, and easy buyability. US online behemoths Amazon and eBay excel at searchability, despite having large catalogs, and are able to capture transactions for shoppers on the go who want to quickly purchase something with a minimal number of keystrokes. Walgreens and Target are particularly strong at enabling mobile sales in their store channels, delivering against specific use cases that shoppers value: finding and saving coupons, refilling prescriptions, etc. Click here to read the full report, or check out our 2015 predictions for how some of these players will perform next year.

How Forrester Can Help?

Want to know how your company stacks up?  Let Forrester’s research based consulting put this benchmark to work for you.  We can apply our criteria to your company’s mobile website and app to uncover where they’re exceling and where there is room for improvement.  In addition to our review and critique of your mobile properties, Forrester will also provide leading competitor scores and specific recommendations on how to more effectively drive mobile sales.  For more information, please contact your account manager or tkozan@forrester.com.