The new mobile and tablet storefronts are designed to enhance the overall shopping experience for on-the-go customers and provide a consistent brand experience wherever the customer chooses to engage. The strategy includes a holiday gift guide, The Art of Gifting Beautifully, to make it easy for mobile and tablet shoppers to find the right product for a friend or family member.

“Mobile is the future and we want to use it to keep sharing our vision of beauty, helping women finding the best product for them in the most convenient and accessible way,” said Alessio Rossi, vice president of digital marketing, ecommerce and CRM at Lancôme, New York. “These new sites add value as they add relevancy.

“With mobile we can serve more personalized content and product information on top of the convenience of enabling shopping anytime, anywhere,” he said. “It also serves to keep the experience consistent across different retail channels.

“The new phone Web site and tablet experience go beyond enabling a transaction. They bring relevant and compelling content to our consumer wherever she is.”

Mobile traffic at 20pc
The new mobile site and tablet experience were undertaken in response to the way that mobile has changed holiday shopping, with shoppers today expecting to be able to connect with their favorite brands across all of the devices that they own. The brand did not previously have a mobile or tablet presense.

As shopping activity increases around the holidays, mobile can give brands an important opportunity to tell their story and forge a connection with shoppers.

 “We see more than 20 percent of traffic coming through mobile devices with a double digit growth rate,” Mr. Rossi said.

“This is both the effect of a natural shift of how the Internet is consumed and the sophistication of our clientele,” he said. “She wants to learn about the brand, get tips, read reviews, locate a store or shop at any time and from everywhere which is what we just delivered.”

An intimate tablet experience
The mobile site offers product details pages incorporating color swatches, videos, how-to information and customer reviews. Additional features include improved category browsing and visual flow, touch browsing and navigation as well as a streamlined checkout

The new mobile sites were designed and implemented by agency SapientNitro leveraging the Demandware Commerce platform, which also supports Lancome’s ecommerce Web site.

The holiday gift guide, which was also designed by SapientNitro features a personalized filtering experience for shopping by price and category for friends of all ages.

The tablet optimized site features larger text size and calls-to-actions and less information on each page while hit areas on the page were increased. 

“IPad users were targeted as the growth in mobile commerce is growing faster for tablet users every year,” said Jaspreet Singh, director of digital strategy for mobile and emerging platforms at SapientNitro, New York.

“More and more people are using a tablet at home in lieu of a desktop machine, and this trend is expected to continue to grow,” he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York