As a Shopify-chosen partner, Visiture will be able to offer its organic marketing and paid digital advertising to Shopify Plus merchants, helping eCommerce brands acquire more customers and increase conversion rates from their online stores.

“Visiture has a strong connection with Shopify Plus – we both provide valued services eCommerce merchants need for growing their businesses,” said Ronald Dod, CMO and co-founder of Visiture. “One of the things we excel at is helping our clients focus on their business without worrying about the technical aspects of marketing their business online and their online storefront. We’re very excited for the opportunity to offer that to Shopify Plus merchants.”

“We are honored to be recognized as a technology partner in the Shopify Plus program,” said Brian Cohen, CEO and Co-Founder of Visiture. “We’re proud to be working with Shopify and look forward to partnering with Shopify Plus merchants as contributors to their success.”

If you’re not familiar, Shopify Plus focuses on emerging brands and high-volume businesses, providing a commerce platform for the next-generation of retail. From mobile ready stores, to innovative pop-up experiences, to direct-to- consumer experimentation, the Shopify Plus platform is enabling the creation and innovation of today’s modern, global merchant, while providing world-class scalability, reliability and flexibility.

The Shopify Plus Partner Program will develop and grow the partner ecosystem for Shopify Plus merchants, allowing them instant access to innovative agencies, experts and technology partners.

To learn more, click here.

The post Visiture Joins Shopify Plus Technology Partner Program appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The new Shopgate Partner Program is designed for systems integrators, technology partners and eCommerce platforms — who are committed to delivering world-class mobile app solutions to their customers.

Shopgate’s ready-to-use infrastructure offers system integrators the advanced mobile app technology needed to build remarkable mobile shopping experiences. With best-in-class features, regular updates, hosting, maintenance and more — partners are able to focus on the customizations required to meet client demands. For a full list of technology capabilities, visit Shopgate’s developer documentation.

Shopgate’s certified early-access systems integration partners include Echidna, Adeo Web, DEP Labs, Ignitiv and Atmosol.

“We are pleased to launch our new Partner Program, giving agencies in our community access to an all-inclusive mobile commerce platform that keeps retailers on top of technology with regular updates, feature releases and more,” said Tiffany Spizzo, vice president of business development at Shopgate. “Through this program, our partners will be able to focus on building customized, user-friendly and content-rich mobile apps that meet today’s shopper demands.”

To learn more, check out Shopgate here.

The post Shopgate Rolls Out Partner Program for Enterprise-Grade App Platform appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Along with Goyal’s responsibility as chair, he will serve as president of the newly formed Utah chapter, growing VRARA to 51 global chapters, 19 of which are located in the U.S., a provided statement explains.

“We’re thrilled to have Amit Goyal join VRARA and chair our retail and eCommerce committee,” said Kris Kolo, Global Executive Director of the VR/AR Association. “His retail industry expertise and insight from building Overstock’s shopping app and AR function marks a crucial addition to VRARA’s growth.”

The award-winning iOS shopping app allows shoppers to view how products, like furniture, rugs, décor and other home goods, fit in their home using a smart phone or tablet with iOS11. With true-to-life-size 3D models in the highest resolution, shoppers have an accurate representation of the product directly in their home or office.

“Augmented reality is changing the way people shop,” said Goyal. “At Overstock, we focus on price, assortment and convenience, and our augmented reality feature brings an innovative convenience to shoppers. It’s important for our customers to see how these products will fit with their décor or simply if it will fit in their living rooms. So, we have invested significant resources to insure we are at the leading edge of AR and we’re proud to bring what we’ve learned and achieved to VRARA.”

The post Overstock.com Garners Global Attention from VR/AR Association for its AR Mobile Innovations appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

This is amplified by contrasting preferences between generations in the face of emerging technology, according to the report “Bots, Texts and Voice: What Cuts Through the Clutter,” published by Narvar.

Per the deatils shared by the post-purchase experience leader, Narvar surveyed 1,290 U.S. shoppers who made an online purchase in the past six months to understand how preferences for communicating with retailers are evolving.

“Bots, voice assistants, smart homes and other AI-informed communications are top of mind for nearly every retailer today. The technology innovation complicates what we already know – that customer communications are never one-size-fit-all,” says Amit Sharma, CEO of Narvar. “With this research, our mission is to equip retailers with the insights they need to navigate nuanced communications and ultimately create the best experiences possible.”

77 percent of American adults own a smartphone; every month, people exchange 2 billion messages with Facebook Messenger’s 100,000 active bots; and 30 million households will have a voice-first, in-home device such as Amazon Echo and Google Home by the end of 2017. These technology-driven communication channels are starting to change the way people want to interact with retailers. While more than 80 percent prefer to get messages from retailers via email, 38 percent now want to hear from retailers on multiple channels. According to the survey, 79 percent of shoppers have also used text messages, messenger apps or voice devices to connect with retailers.

“People expect a personalized, effortless online shopping experience from discovery to post-purchase. This is only amplified with the introduction of new communications channels,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail industry analyst who collaborated with Narvar on this study. “Retail brands should seize the opportunity to learn from and optimize consumer communications through both existing and emerging channels. The first step is to understand how their customers want to communicate based on elements like urgency, type of message and specific channel. ”

To learn more, check out the full report here.

The post Narvar Survey Reveals Early Shifts in Shopper Behavior appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Lisa Paccione, Vice President, Americas Sales, Syniverse 

Although mobile wallet has been available on smartphones for several years for payments, it has been an underutilized asset to complement apps and other mobile communication channels in order to enable marketers to better engage with customers and boost loyalty.

While some brands have started integrating mobile wallet, most still haven’t realized the full opportunity for engagement. Mobile wallet awareness is now reaching a point where marketers can no longer afford to not fully embrace it. With this in mind, Syniverse recently completed a mobile wallet study that offers insights for marketers seeking to take greater advantage of this channel. We’ll explore some of the key findings from the study before diving into strategies for getting started with mobile wallet.

New Findings and New Directions for Mobile Wallet Use

In a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers and 1,000 U.K. consumers, we identified three critical findings:

• Nearly two thirds of respondents said they are aware of mobile wallet, and it’s available on 90 percent of smartphones today.
• Of those that have a mobile wallet in the U.S., 53 percent use it at least once a week and as many as 29 percent use it daily.
• More than half of those in the U.S. that initially did not know about mobile wallets are interested in using them.

In addition to this study, a 2017 Mobile Consumer Report shows that nearly 40 percent of smartphone users surveyed in the U.K. and U.S. currently use the non-payment portion of a mobile wallet to store information – such as offers, coupons and airline boarding passes. This promising insight is explored further in the report showing that nearly 70 percent of those surveyed believe mobile wallet offers from a brand would positively impact their view of the brand and would encourage them to make a purchase.

These findings provide important data for marketers. There is a clear market opportunity for adopting mobile wallet solutions. Based on our findings, however, one of the first steps is for brands to create awareness of wallet and educate consumers by enticing them to take advantage of mobile wallet’s benefits. Mobile wallet will offer an increasingly valuable engagement channel for those brands that create compelling strategies.

Three Strategies to Get Started

Based on this survey data and lessons learned from recent customer engagements, here are three strategies that I’ve found to be crucial for enlightening consumers about mobile wallet and getting a wallet campaign off the ground:

• Use geolocation-based offers – Using geolocation to determine when a person is near a store and reaching them with a coupon, reward, or other mobile wallet item at the “mobile moment,” when they are most likely to be making a purchasing decision, is critical. This precisely timed outreach enables brands to influence customers to act on a particular purchase as well as encourage them to shop more.
• Integrate with loyalty programs – Mobile wallet offers a particularly complementary fit with loyalty programs. Customers can immediately earn and redeem points without having to search for their physical loyalty cards or dig through their apps for information. Developing a loyalty program that integrates mobile wallet items offers a unique benefit that can spur customers to use loyalty programs more heavily and thereby shop and increase purchases.
• Bridging instore and digital – Offering mobile experiences along the customer’s instore journey through wallet can help brands boost revenue, increase efficiencies and remain agile. As one example, Chipotle Mexican Grill recently launched a mobile wallet campaign when it closed all its locations for a company-wide meeting. For customers who visited a store that was closed, Chipotle offered those customers a free burrito, redeemable through a mobile wallet coupon. The restaurant set up window signs urging customers to text a number to receive a coupon, and the response rate was unprecedented, with about 5.3 million people requesting the offer, and 3.5 million people redeeming it.

In these ways, mobile wallet offers a powerful but still underutilized engagement channel to dynamically connect with customers. The first step is to entice consumers to try mobile wallet and educate them that wallet is much more than a payment method. These three strategies here can help brands take the first steps.

The post New Data Unveils Strategies to Help You Get Started with Mobile Wallet appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

If you’re not familiar, Commerce Cloud enables brands to provide personalized experiences for shoppers that span web, mobile, social and brick and mortar. And now, as part of Salesforce, we’re told that brands can deliver “completely unified experiences for customers that extend beyond commerce to include marketing, customer service and more.”

From the official announcement:

Radius8 delivers a location-specific merchandised online experience around the radius of each physical store based on data in that store and local signals surrounding the store to help Commerce Cloud customers achieve greater conversion of online traffic and increased store foot traffic. By combining data from the brick and mortar store with local signals such as weather, events happening nearby, local sales trends, and social feeds from platforms like Twitter, Radius8 enables customers to maximize the profitability of the both their digital and physical stores.

“Consumers are demanding highly relevant cross channel experiences, yet most retailers offer no online visibility to the local store or leverage the local signals surrounding that store that can create contextually relevant engagement,” Radius8 CEO Sandeep Bhanote tells is. “With Radius8, a retailer’s digital presence becomes location aware so that every customer gets a unique experience based on their geolocation and the surrounding local market influences. For example, a national retailer’s website could provide a unique experience to someone who is at the beach in Miami where it is sunny and 95 degrees than someone who is walking to work in the rain in NYC.”

The post First Look: Radius8 Joins Salesforce Partner Program appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Once scanned, the company tells us, the card account number will populate within the registration, which serves to streamline the process.

Citi is the only major U.S. credit card issuer to offer the ability for cardmembers to scan both embossed and non-embossed credit cards within a mobile app.

“With more customer logins now occurring through our app than through a browser, we continue to find creative solutions to make their lives simpler and easier,” says Alice Milligan, Chief Customer and Digital Experience Officer for Citi Global Cards and Consumer Services. “By enabling the ability to scan their cards rather than input 16 digits on a mobile keyboard, it further streamlines the credit card activation process in the palm of cardmembers’ hands.”

Once the card account number is scanned, cardmembers will only need to input their CVV, date of birth and last four digits of their SSN to activate their card.

The feature is available within the Citi Mobile App for iPhone and Android.

The post Citi Rolls Out Latest Advances in Mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Despite rarely being acknowledged for doing so, the Amazon Marketplace creates opportunities for sellers, brand owners and entrepreneurs to reach customers around the world.

FBA items shipped worldwide grew more than 50 percent during the holiday season, while Prime members ordered millions of items from sellers in the Seller Fulfilled Prime program offering free two-day or next-day shipping.

“2016 was a record-breaking year in sales worldwide for sellers on Amazon. The Amazon Marketplace empowers brand owners and retailers of all sizes, many of them small businesses, to reach customers around the world,” said Peter Faricy, VP for Amazon Marketplace. “In fact, according to our economic studies, sellers have created over 600,000 new jobs outside of Amazon. Sellers are choosing Amazon because we help them build and grow their businesses with impactful programs like Seller Fulfilled Prime, and we’re proud of the fact that sellers are reinvesting their success into their local communities by creating jobs.”

“As a growing business and brand owner, the Amazon Exclusives and FBA programs helped us accelerate our business to achieve more than 100 percent growth in sales this year,” said Ben Arneberg, co-founder of Willow & Everett. “The FBA service handles the work of packaging and shipping orders to customers, which gives us the time to create new products that customers will love. We had our most successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday ever, and on Prime Day earlier in the year our sales boomed more than 10x compared to last year.”

The post Amazon Sellers Coming Off of Record Year, Says Online and Mobile Retail Giant appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The final numbers aren’t in yet, but numerous studies indicate that consumers now demand discounts and other promotions (free shipping, for instance) in order for retailers to snag a sale.

In other words, deep discounting might have boosted sales a bit, but they also bite deeply into actual profit.

“Retailers, which typically close their fiscal fourth quarter end of this month or early next month, are expected to see their critical holiday quarter profit decline 1.9 percent on average, according to Retail Metrics, a research firm that tracks Wall Street analysts’ estimates and provides retail industry research and data to institutional investors,” reports eMarketer. “While retail giant Wal-Mart’s expected profit decline (thanks to its technology and other investments) is the key culprit contributing to the sector’s decline, holiday discounting is also partly to blame.”

Retail Metrics president Ken Perkins even suggests that 53 major retailers — about half of the group his firm tracked — are expected to see lower fourth-quarter profit.

“Among the holiday winners, Perkins pointed to retailers including Amazon, beauty products seller Ulta, T.J. Maxx parent TJX, athletic gear retailer Lululemon and electronics chain Best Buy,” notes the report. “Still, he said the firm’s December store checks generally found disappointing in-store traffic and conversions.”

One big takeaway from the holiday? It’s hard to make an actual profit without an omnichannel strategy.

“Almost 70 percent of total holiday related spending occurred in stores with both a physical and online presence as consumers routinely favor shopping with retailers that have a physical location, according to an International Council of Shopping Center’s post-holiday shopper survey,” reports eMarketer. “Among millennials, for instance, the survey showed 77 percent of them said it’s important to buy online from stores that have a physical presence.”

The survey found that 91 percent of holiday shoppers made purchases at physical stores — about the same as holiday 2015.

The post Holiday Sales Healthy, But It Took Discounts, Promotions, and Omnichannel to Get There appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

While Black Friday brings the traditional brick-and-mortar stampede, more and more shoppers are chilling on Friday and waiting for deals on the internet’s biggest retail event of the year — Cyber Monday. That’s when commerce sellers of all sizes roll out the internet equivalent of door-buster deals for online shoppers.

As a shipper and 3PL warehouse for many commerce businesses, Red Stag Fulfillment knows a lot about this process. Now the company is out with some tips — with pros and cons — to help online retailers gauge their best strategies.

For instance, asks Red Stag in a blog post, “can smaller e-commerce sellers break through the noise with promotions and campaigns that target repeat customers and bring in new clientele?”

Red Stag comes down on the side of getting with the Cyber Monday excitement.

“On November 28, online shoppers will be looking for Cyber Monday banners and deals,” notes the company. “Adding a Cyber Monday logo to your site can generate excitement; without it, your customers may drift off to other sites with the thought that they can come back to your shop any day. An event-specific deal can give people a reason to buy now.”

But there is a caveat: even “etailers” should strive to compete on quality, not just price.

“When it comes to deep, loss-leader discounts, your small e-commerce site can’t compete with the big retail chains,” the firm notes. “In fact, shoppers who visit your online store just because of a Cyber Monday deal might not be your ideal customers, especially if you rely on a clientele that appreciates what you have to offer based on the quality of your merchandise and your personalized service. Instead of discounts on Cyber Monday, consider offering something that only you can give, such as a free webinar on home decorating with your tablecloth and napkin sets or one-of-a-kind gift packaging. Some other ideas: give virtual consultations to customers who buy more than a certain dollar amount of beauty projects or offer a Facebook Live session to help your customers choose the right children’s clothing sizes.”

In short, suggests Red Stag, “make Cyber Monday a fun community event at your online shop, rather than a mad scramble for bargains.”

Another pro tip: Coupons and specials do make shoppers happy.

“Shoppers love to feel like they are getting a special deal that not everyone can access. A small gift, coupon, or discount tied to Cyber Monday can give your loyal following that special feeling of being on the inside. Consider a secret coupon code just for your best customers or those who sign up to receive your e-newsletter.”

Reserving that privilege for best customers might be wise, however. As RSF puts it: you don’t want to “run the risk of turning your good customers into bargain hunters who won’t click the buy button without a coupon code.”

And here’s another heads-up. Sure, there will be lots of activity on Cyber Monday, but the truth is this: online shopping is already happening.

“When Cyber Monday first became a thing, internet shopping was in its infancy. The big sales day for online shopping was traditionally on the Monday after Thanksgiving because people used internet connections at work to do their online shopping,” explains RSF. “Now that many more people have home internet and most people can shop 24/7 on their smartphones, Monday isn’t really the day. Many retailers recognize this by offering “Cyber Monday” deals starting much earlier. If you’re lucky, your first holiday rush is likely to come over the weekend.”

There are more tips and tales in Red Stag Fulfillment’s post. And they’re a must-read for any e-commerce retailer this holiday season.

The post As E-Commerce Firms Prepare for Cyber Monday, Red Stag Fulfillment Offers Tips appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.