Urban-style clothing and accessories brand Baby Phat has launched a mobile commerce site that gives visitors a personalized experience based on cookied user information.

New shoppers are assigned a cookie when they land on http://m.babyphat.com, which begins tracking from the first click. But even before the shopper clicks on an item or category, the Baby Phat site personalizes the homepage based on how that person arrived at the site such as from a paid search keyword.

“The strategy here was to provide Baby Phat with a mobile presence since about 3 percent of their Web traffic was coming from mobile devices,” said Michael Ebert, director of marketing at eFashionSolutions, Secaucus, NJ.

“Baby Phat was seeing a .4 percent conversion from consumers visiting the Web site from their mobile device without an optimized site,” he said. “Consumers are trying to shop via mobile so why not provide them with a better, more personalized experience?”

EFashionSolutions is an ecommerce enabler for designer, luxury, entertainment and retail brands such as Baby Phat and New Era.

MyBuys, which provides the personalization services for the Baby Phat mobile site, is a full-service personalization-driven, mobile offering for ecommerce. MyBuys has partnered with mobile platform provider Branding Brand to build MyBuys mobile personalized sites.

Mobile purchases
American consumers will spend $2.4 billion in purchases using their mobile phones in 2010, up 100 percent from $1.2 billion in 2009, according to ABI Research.

Amazon alone reported more than $1 billion in sales orders using mobile devices utilizing the power of personalization.

However, many retailers have yet to address the mobile commerce opportunity of implementing personalization as the basis for their optimization.

Because mobile shopping sites display little content, it is paramount that all offers and products are relevant to each consumer.

Baby Phat Mobile
The Baby Phat mobile destination went live on Oct. 4 and incorporates Facebook functionality to make the shopping experience more social for customers.

In terms of personalization, MyBuys helps Baby Phat build profiles on site visitors.

Every customer who visits Baby Phat’s mobile site is recognized as an individual with unique preferences and shopping behaviors.

Profile data is built based on browsing patterns, items purchased and products abandoned in-cart.

Based on this information, Baby Phat is able to tailor its homepage based upon various indicators of intent.

Intent creates the first set of recommendations on the site and each successive click refines recommendations.

In addition, the various indicators of intent help Baby Phat market to consumers on a one-to-one basis.

“What is key here is that we are able to track where consumers have come from, whether it is from an affiliate site or via a Google [paid] search campaign,” Mr. Ebert said.

Inventory management
MyBuys’ technology takes a regular Internet Web site and repurposes it for consumers based on the devices they are using.

Using this technology, Baby Phat gets to keep its online and mobile inventory management under one roof, making it more streamlined since the orders come through the same system.

“Mobile orders are not flagged any differently,” Mr. Ebert said. “It is the same back-end as if people placed the order via desktop.”

Mr. Ebert said that Baby Phat is able to reach international audiences with its mobile commerce-enabled site, since many countries use mobile as their primary entrance to the Internet.

“I have seen studies that said 75-80 percent of retailers are interested in implementing a mobile strategy,” Mr. Ebert said. “Our thumb is on the pulse and a true fashionista is always on the go so mobile was imperative to be able to cater to that person.

“Aside from just providing a mobile experience, we have an app strategy in the works for Baby Phat,” he said. “I can’t say too much about it now, but we are looking to help consumers via a lifestyle shopping tool.”

Final take
Giselle Tsirulnik is senior editor of Mobile Commerce Daily