Tomorrow we’ll be releasing our 3^rd annual Mobile report, and as everyone knows, smart mobile devices have shaken retail to its foundations. With brand new digital paths-to-purchase, times have truly changed, and retailers are absorbing what that change means to their businesses. But what’s a lot harder to quantify is exactly how retailers are responding to these new challenges – and how the best are able to convert them into opportunity. We set out to find out that very thing, and here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll see in the full report.

• By early last year (2013), retailers had developed a clear sense that the top challenge facing the industry was that “consumers are using mobile as part of their shopping experience and we need to be there. ” While that remains their top challenge this year, two factors have changed in the past 12 months: For the better, far fewer retailers are concerned about “confusion in the marketplace about what makes a successful strategy. ” However, on the downside, retailers are now far more concerned about “consumers’ privacy concerns. ” We examine what both of this trends mean in the Business Challenges section of the report.
• So far, retailers see mobile as an opportunity that extends far more to their consumers than they do to their own efforts to help “be there ” with them. In essence, this exemplifies the tone of the entire report: retailers see the odds as stacked, and virtually all of the ways they can help to balance the stakes are secondary to the advantages of mobile for consumers. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t advantages to retailers. We dig into what they are in the Opportunities section.
• In comparison to last year’s report, when retailers identified their top internal obstacle as not having enough eCommerce/Mobile resources to manage all of the available mobile opportunities, this is no longer the case. The tide has turned, and retailers tell us that it’s become all about fighting for budget, once more. Does this indicate that budgets have frozen? Or does it mean that retailers have too many “top ” priorities while trying to engage with empowered consumers across multiple fronts? We examine this within Organizational Inhibitors.
• Though still in early days, there is vast distance between retailers’ understanding of the value of many of today’s technical solutions and actual use – even though many of those technologies have been available for quite some time. Find out which are in play – and which should be – in the Technology Enablers section of the full report.