Dear retailer,

Last week I found an email in my inbox from my favorite convenience store. Tracking my shopping behavior using the credit card it had issued to me, the retailer had noticed that I visited a new branch and sent me an email to let me know about its convenience offerings in stores around my home post code. It made me think about convenience. It's what we're all looking for, isn't it? We all want the ability to do just a little bit more with what we already have -- and to finish off our to-do lists more quickly while we're at it.

Customer convenience is certainly on the minds of Forrester's analysts. My colleague Carrie Johnson, in How To Get Customers To Shop Online, identifies the challenges that retailers face in replicating in-store experiences, while also conceding that "convenience has naturally become the primary reason why consumers shop online." Sucharita Mulpuru writes that online retailers, membership clubs, and discount retailers should prove especially resilient in the current American recessionary period -- with 84% of Web buyers saying that they plan to spend the same or more in the next year -- because "all three provide customers the benefits of value and convenience."

And my colleague Victoria Bracewell Lewis, in her post-Christmas-season analysis of European buying trends, notes that when the biggest shopping season of them all rolls around, the relative effortlessness of the Web channel is absolutely essential to its continued success. In fact, as she writes in Trends 2008: European eCommerce And Online Retail, the single largest source of revenue loss for most online retailers is shopping cart abandonment -- driven in large measure by sources of inconvenience in the online space. Sensing a trend?

So where should we look for new sources of consumer convenience and better user experiences? To start, the online channel, which can still use more attention. In comparison with mobile devices or virtual worlds, online shopping seems comparatively well established and point-of-sale apps seem positively ancient. Yet retailers still haven't satisfactorily pursued the infrastructure necessary to drive customer convenience through online channels. How do we know this? Consider the following:

• As Brian Walker notes, online retailers have put product content management on the back burner, neglecting key opportunities to drive the customer experience.

• Sucharita Mulpuru notes that despite the fact that cross-channel shopping is expected to top $1 trillion by 2012, only one-third of multichannel retailers report that their staff has access to information from other channels.

• Larry Fulton published a case study demonstrating the importance for a retailer of applying an IT architecture review to develop more coherent and consumer-convenient multichannel interactions.

• In my own research, I recently investigated the importance for retailers with complex assortments of short-product-life merchandise or apps that guarantee consistency and accuracy of data to describe merchandise, and present it conveniently, to consumers working on home remodeling or home entertainment upgrade projects.

Another opportunity to improve convenience is in the mobile channel. Make no mistake, when we talk multichannel retail, we are talking about (and will increasingly talk about) mobile. My colleague Bill Nagel recently published a report detailing the various infrastructure, security, and security challenges that must be faced to benefit from the mobile transaction market that is well established in Asia and emerging in Europe but still struggling in North America.

And lastly, consider virtual worlds. My colleagues Paul Jackson and Erica Driver emphasize the ways in which this growing technology can lead to expedited business interactions. Paul has also published a report detailing the opportunities retailers have to bridge the Web 2.0 gap -- and thereby service a young, dynamic market in better, more convenient ways.

My First Look this month has been about convenience -- what it means for consumers and what retailers need to do to keep up. In the months to come, I plan on publishing research on developing the road map to support cross-channel interactions. It's my hope that Forrester will continue to "convenience" your company in the months and years to come. Please feel free to email me at George.Lawrie@forrester.com with your suggestions for research you'd like to see us publish in the future.

Best regards,
George Lawrie
Principal analyst

Research Referenced In This Issue Case Study: A Multichannel Retailer Boosts Standards Compliance With Architecture Review (45376) European Online Youth And Virtual Worlds (44419) Extending Mobile Identity Beyond Authentication (43632) Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds (43450) How Consumers Actually Shop For Retail Products Across Channels (45923) How To Get Customers To Shop Online (45822) Lessons For Online Retail From Europe's 2007 Christmas Season (45167) Maximizing eCommerce Content To Drive Sales (45948) Retail Enterprise Apps Evolution (44036) The State Of Retailing Online 2008: Marketing Report (45568) Trends 2008: European eCommerce And Online Retail (44528) Why US B2C eCommerce Will Weather The Economic Downturn Well (45932)

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