Why does Online Shopping on your Smartphone have to be so Clunky?

When the age of smartphone dawned about five years ago, online retailers began to salivate over how they could be within reach of a vast number of shoppers at all hours of the day and how they would easily and casually end up buying a lot more than they ever had. At a time when business owners were happy merely with ways in which to advertise to phone owners, here was a new way in which to actually sell to them. But that online shopping dream has somewhat soured.  It isn't that the general smartphone owning public isn't interested in shopping on their phones. It's just that retailers haven't really developed effective enough mobile sites and apps that could make the experience pleasurable.

Visit the mobile version of many online shopping sites (if those retailers have even bothered to make mobile versions), and you are quickly struck by how difficult it can be to browse anything. Nothing seems to be designed for the 3 inch screen you hold in the palm of your hand. And pages can be frustratingly slow too. Have you ever tried entering shipping information on those pages? They must've made them for the fingers of a one-year-old. These retailers therefore shouldn't really be surprised that no more than 3% of their sales come from customers on smartphones.

Retailers have done online shopping on the mobile right, really have seen spectacular returns. EBay, for instance, projects that it will earn $4 billion from customers on smartphones this year, having had a great time last year. Famous retail brand names like Bed, Bath & Beyond on the other hand, don't have mobile versions for their websites. They don't even have apps. Only one out of 10 American retailers has a website that works on smartphones. It isn't that the promise of the mobile customer has somehow faded. Customers with smartphones have been their insistent in their demand. It's just that retailers have been very slow to respond.

One of the big success stories in online shopping for the mobile has been Amazon. Amazon started developing a mobile version of its website even before the smartphone came along in the form of the iPhone. They used innovative ways in which to navigate their website like barcode scanning and auto-complete. Going online on sites like Amazon, you already have all your information on the company's servers. It can be a quick and painless experience.

Quick and painless is hardly how most mobile shoppers would describe their online shopping experience on other sites. Retailers are beginning to realize that they can't give their shoppers an experience like they would have had in 1996. There can't be dead links. Travel happens to be one of the most popular things to shop for by phone. People just love when they are standing in line somewhere or suffering through the train trip, to browse through flight options or hotel room options. A few travel websites like HipMunk have done a particularly great job here.

Outsmarting the Retail Researchers at the Shopping Mall

Retail today has been boiled down to an exact science. Go to any successful shopping mall store today, and you can be pretty sure that they hire a retail researcher to get and to remain on top of their game. Retail researchers earn their stripes studying thousands of shoppers as they go about stores trying to spend the most money for the least satisfaction (it could be the other way around too). These are people who sit and think through the night and over the weekends about how exactly they can get into the heads of shoppers and find what buttons they have that they’ll let them push to get them to buy. Nothing you see in any store these days is just set that way because it's pretty or convenient. If store designers believed that putting baby diapers on a shelf 10 feet up would sell more of them, that's what they would do.

Fortunately, it's a free country; it isn't just the retail researchers who can try to get under in your head; you could do the same thing to them - with reverse psychology. Take your average fun and youthful clothing store at the shopping mall. Now people have got pretty used to seeing labels on clothing that say something about how they're made in China or Sri Lanka or Vietnam. Retail researchers note that customers don't really prefer imports; it makes them feel uncomfortable that these products could be made in sweatshops in poor conditions. If they had some way to lie to customers about where those clothes are made, it would sell a lot more of them. So stores often buy clothes from whatever sweatshop they want, but require that the clothes be shipped without any labels on. They then sew on their own labels with no mention of the country of origin. All they do is to make sure that there is no appearance of any foreign script or anything. This makes customers just assume that the clothing is domestic. It's your job in there to not fall for these tricks

Any shopping mall you visit, you're bound to find about three dozen twofer offers at every clothing store around. If you're not familiar with the kind of prices a store usually has, you really shouldn't fall for these promotions. To begin with, these twofer offers could just be outright lies. But even if they weren't that, they are still aimed at getting you to spend a lot more than you originally intended. They want you to buy ten even if you just wanted to buy two. You can't be swayed by this kind of temptation. You can't consider it to be saving money if you’re spending more than you intended to.

Store designers at any shopping mall will always use subtle psychology to get you shopping for the most expensive products they have. The clearance items are usually in the back of the store where there are no staff and where everything is quite messy. The expensive things in the store are usually to your right when you enter the store, and are more brightly lit. They are placed to the right because most people are right-handed and that's where they will feel comfortable having. Stay warned, and you could come out with your wallet intact.

Judging Today's Retail Trends - is Wal-Mart still the Cheapest?

Look closely at today's retail trends and there is at least one area where the experts seem not that much better informed than lay everyday shoppers. Ask any ordinary shopper about what retailer he thinks offers the best deals on a consistent and reliable basis and more often than not, they are likely to point to the Every Day Low Prices at Wal-Mart. That's what happens when a company just entrenches itself in your imagination with relentless marketing. When it is no longer able to keep up with the reputation it's built, you still don't notice.

This then is what is happening with Wal-Mart: they are actually raising prices on many of their important sales leaders. And even in the traditionally competitive area of groceries, there is a competitor they have yielded their position to. It is Target. Traditionally, Wal-Mart has been known to be in a position of particular advantage; they always had such massive buying power that no one else could get the kind of prices they could. They used their buying power, their efficiency and high technology, in a way other retailers just could not approach.

But over the last year, people studying retail trends have seen something strange going on at Wal-Mart - their everyday low price strategy isn't really in evidence anymore. Wal-Mart began to rely on rollbacks last year. Wal-Mart stores also cleaned out all the shelves piled high with deals. And then, they began to roll back the rollbacks too. On average, Wal-Mart prices are higher today than a year ago and there are fewer rollbacks.

As the experts who study retail trends are beginning to see now, Wal-Mart is having a really hard time beating other retailers' prices. At this time, Wal-Mart really hasn't ceded the market in low-cost shopping to Target. But depending on what kinds of items you buy, Target may be cheaper. The average shopper may end up saving only one dollar at Target overall; but in the retail industry, that's a big sign of where the deals are in the future.

In matters of grocery shopping, Target, with its freshly-expanded grocery section is almost always the winner on price. Perhaps this is because Target has more private label stuff to offer, while Wal-Mart offers more national brands. If you are a shopper trying to make the most of your money, today's retail trends ask you to make changes.

For groceries, you should probably go to Target; still, going to a superstore does take time and gas. Consider looking at regular supermarkets in your area. Some supermarkets offer lower prices than either Wal-Mart or Target. Wal-Mart has started to deal more in generating a perception of low prices than actually offering them. They will have a few deep discounts that they heavily advertise; but the other products in the store will be about the regular price. Make sure that you are actually buying the low prices and not a perception of it.

Managing Retail Gift Cards That You Don't Know What To With

There's quite nothing as annoying as a gift that you can't use. People give retail gift cards when they can't think of the right thing to gift - it's supposed to be as flexible as a gift can be. So what you do when you get a gift card from dear old Nana that's from a store that you just don't ever shop from? It's a painful part of the whole holiday gift-giving rigmarole. A gift is supposed to make you happy; not give you heartburn. Isn't there some way you can use the clutch of gift cards you have collected over the years and turn them into something you can really actually use?

As it turns out, there are enough people out there who find themselves in this kind of position that there's a small cottage industry that's sprung up around helping these people do something about their unusable gift cards. There are all these websites, GiftCards, GiftCardGranny, PlasticJungle, and others. You just sell your gift cards to them, they charge you a 10% service fee, and it's like you're getting free money. Most of the time, you don't even need to spend on postage. You just need to register with one of these websites and they'll send you a prepaid envelope that has postage marked on it. With websites like GiftCards, you can just go to one of their affiliate stores in your city and hand in your card for cash. If you would like to exchange the unusable gift card for retail gift cards from Amazon that you can actually use, they won't deduct as much of a commission as they would if you asked for cash.

Cardpool, another gift card service, allows you a novel option. If you happen to be crazy about some Facebook game, you can redeem your retail gift cards for Facebook credits that you can use on games and applications on that website. And perhaps, best of all, in the spirit of Christmas, PlasticJungle allows you to donate either all of the value of your gift cards or just part of them, to a charity that you choose.

You can be sure that these options will turn more and more popular from now on. New federal rules have made it so that retail gift cards have to be valid for at least five years from when they are bought. And even when they do expire, the law says that a replacement card is yours for free.

Mall Gift Card

If you want to get a gift card for someone, but you are not sure where they would like to shop, and you have no idea if they like the same things that you do, there is one very neat way around this problem. Instead of getting them something from just one store, see if your local shopping center offers the mall gift card. This card is sold through mall customer service and can be used at any store in the mall. This means the person getting this card is always going to find a great way to spend the money you have given them as a gift.

The mall gift card goes through the mall and not through the individual stores. Though most stores in the mall will take this card, there are some of them that opt out of this service. When you are using or buying one of these cards, ask for a list of stores in that mall that will accept the card. You should find that almost 90 percent or more of the stores will take it, but some of your favorites may not. Your friend should still find all that they need in the stores on the list that will accept the card from any shopper.

Most shopping centers use the mall gift card as a way to get more people shopping in their stores. They ask stores to take them, and then the mall reimburses that store or those stores that take them for the amount of money the customer spent with the card in that store. The mall houses the stores, and the stores pay them rent to be there, but the mall also offers promotional services for these businesses. The mall gift card is just one of the ways that they can do this. If it is a big mall, you can find almost anything there, which makes it a truly welcome gift for anyone.

If you are shopping with one of these cards, stop and make a plan. You may have just enough on it to get a discount on something you really want, but if you got a card loaded up with cash, there are so many things you could get. Think about what you really want and what stores have these things. You can use the card in any amount at any store that is in the program. That means you can buy something for ten dollars in one store, move on to the next and spend three dollars, and then go on to someone else and spend fifty. It's almost like being a kid in a candy store.

Some people do not use the mall gift card up all at once. If you do not spend all of the money on the card the mall retains that money. Most do not give cash refunds for unused portions of cards, though it would not hurt to ask. If you are not sure how much you have spent, you can go to customer service and they can usually tell you how much you have left. Ask about fees and expiration dates so that you are sure you use the card before it expires, if it does.