I don’t know about you, but counting them all up, I think I saw no less than 5 demos of mobile applications at NRF this year. I think it says a lot for the state of mobile commerce when many of the demos emphasized Look, there’s a ‘buy’ button! However, there’s a lot more going on under the surface.

First, these were not stand-alone applications. However, many of them did not come from what I would characterize as your typical eCommerce engine. In particular, order management vendors are getting into the game, either by providing the frameworks to hook into another platform’s mobile commerce play, if not outright leveraging their own commerce platform capabilities to supply a mobile storefront. The result is an emphasis on inventory availability and locations, as well as access to order status — all good things that go well beyond the buy button. My take-away: mCommerce has evolved beyond a stand-alone effort. As a result, while the demos were all look, you can buy!, the underlying reality is far more mature. Sterling’s employee-facing app, and Epicor’s mix and match product browsing both stood out as evidence of this maturity.

Second, watch social media for what’s next in mobile. One thing that was not demo’d, at least for me, was what all these new mobile capabilities mean in terms of understanding shopper behavior. However, one thing that was demo’d heavily at the show was social media analytics — getting closer to understanding shopper sentiment and shopper intent, rather than relying exclusively on what they’ve purchased. If your goal is to understand intent, then mobile can also go a long way towards driving those kinds of insights, in the right context. The right context, however, is not Buy! — it’s Let me help you shop. What’s the difference? Targeting ways to help consumers long before they get to the buy part of the interaction gives you insight into what they’re thinking about. For every interaction that you help enable, you can also derive insights. With mobile, you might actually get those insights in the store — long a holy grail for retailers.

That’s as far as mobile got at NRF. But here’s where it needs to go:

• Location-aware. OK, sure, some of the demos I saw showed store locations on a map, in relation to the user’s current position. Some could provide aisle guidance as to where to locate an item in the store. But all of this left me feeling unsatisfied. I don’t think retail has really begun to tap into the capabilities that location awareness can provide. I’m not even sure that leading edge consumers and mobile pundits know all the ways to make the most of location awareness. Augmented reality may or may not play a role — at a minimum, it seems a fairly easy way to present location-based information beyond on a map. I think there will be a lot more innovation here yet to come.
• Loyalty card. I feel like we made this mistake with biometrics — focused too much on buy and not enough on the process leading up to the transaction. If biometrics had focused first on getting rid of the loyalty card, then it might have had better results. But instead companies like PayByTouch focused on a high value/high risk proposition that entailed tying into customer payments. Mobile payments seems to be going nowhere in the US at the moment, but with an app for everything, why can’t a retailer’s app effectively be the consumer’s loyalty card? If I, as a consumer, download a retailer’s app, register it as my loyalty card, and then use it to store my shopping lists, my wishlists, my coupons, check and redeem my loyalty points? As a retailer, you now have FAR more insight into not only my behavior, but my intentions as well. Tie in camera-based barcode scanning, live chat, special access areas for special customers… Now we’re talking about something far more important — both for consumers and for retailers — than just buy! on a phone.

I said before NRF that this year could easily be tagged as the year of mobile retail. NRF did not prove me wrong. However, for as exciting as this channel is, and as big as its potential may be, there is still a long way to go before it is an integrated part of the consumer’s shopping experience. But there’s one thing retailers can rely on: consumers will drive the adoption, and do so at a speed that retailers will find very difficult to match.

On your marks.

Get set.

Go!