SAN ANTONIO, TX – A Moosejaw executive at eTail West 2014 said that since rolling out mobile point-of-sale 18 months ago, the outdoor gear retailer is now seeing mobile hit 40 percent of the company’s revenue.

Executives from Moosejaw, Shoe Carnival, Destination XL Group and RetailMeNot spoke about mobile’s role in the in-store experience during the “The Integration of Digital and In-Store to Create Effective Omnichannel Experiences” panel. Moosejaw has 11 bricks-and-mortar locations as well as online and mobile sites, and the company uses mobile to integrate these two experiences together across all mediums.

“We rolled out mobile in-store about 18 months ago, and it’s only been beneficial if you take the right approach,” said Bryan Lively, vice president of retail at Moosejaw, Madison Heights, MI.

“I can tell you just from what we’ve rolled out in the last 18 months, we’ve seen both from an in-store customer as well as an online customer – now over the fourth-quarter, 40 percent of online revenue is actually coming from mobile devices, so it’s almost that you have to treat it as a good thing because it’s contributing to such a large factor of revenue at this point in time,” he said.

Mobile retail
Moosejaw’s multichannel strategy is based around the idea is that consumers should see the same marketing in-store, online and in print catalogs since the retailer has more than 230,000 SKUs with about 35,000 SKUs in-store.

These multichannel marketing initiatives also bleed over into loyalty, pricing and customer service.

While there are benefits to this kind of holistic approach, it also means that consumers have increasingly high expectations.

“The big challenge I think is bringing the whole group together to have one common goal and from an entity standpoint to not be a challenge with each other,” Mr. Lively said.

The panel

Supporting in-store sales
As opposed to solely focusing on on-device sales, much of the discussion during the session was around loyalty and rewards programs.

Jay Nigrelli, vice president of ecommerce at Destination XL Group, Canton, MA, agreed with the panel that one of the biggest benefits of mobile is enhancing the in-store experience.

The men’s apparel brand rolled out a mobile-optimized site last summer. Through the company’s CRM, consumers can log-in and view a rewards certificate that consumers can use to actually apply to a purchase immediately or scan the offer in-store.

“Our customers don’t visit us all the time, so to create an app where we expect them to come back and shop and browse over and over again probably isn’t realistic, but if we build an app specifically for rewards and reward them for visiting either in-store or opening up the app, then I think there is potential there,” Mr. Nigrelli said.

Additionally, an executive from Shoe Carnival acknowledged that mobile conversions are not as high as other mediums, however there is a significant portion of traffic coming from mobile devices.

Shoe Carnival is currently working on an in-store mobile app that is primarily designed for smartphones.

The app will let consumers add their loyalty information to instantly redeem offers and is also looking at adding PayPal as a payment option inside stores.

The other goal of the app is to aid in endless aisle so that consumers have access to all of the brand’s products, which could be activated by scanning a bar code. Shoe Carnival is aiming to get 80 percent of its inventory online as part of its endless aisle initiatives.

The brand may also roll out some employee-facing tablets with the app installed.

“The initial numbers I saw around mobile percentage of use for a ten-day period from Thanksgiving on — I thought the numbers were wrong,” said Kent Zimmerman, vice president of ecommerce at Shoe Carnival, Evansville, IL.

“On Thanksgiving, we had 65 percent of all of our traffic coming from mobile devices,” he said. “A year ago I would have laughed if you had told me that was the case.”

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York