The world has gone mobile.  Millions of consumers now prefer to buy online.  When they do buy in-store, they often use their smart phones to

1. Scopri nuovi prodotti
2. Trova occasioni
3. Individuare le aree del negozio di interesse
4. Utilizza i coupon mobili
5. Condividi gli acquisti con gli amici
6. Scopri le nuove tendenze sui siti di social media

With the growth of smartphones, mobile commerce and shopping through wireless handheld devices such as cell phones or tablets has the potential to grow even more in the future.  Shoppers are demanding more services that are centered on mobile devices.  Retailers have the opportunity and challenge of providing customers with services and apps that consumers can use.

Pagamenti mobili

New developments in mobile commerce such as faster mobile payments, social retail and one-click purchases have profoundly changed the way customers shop. Smartphones have actually connected shoppers with brands spending more time looking for the best deals or researching brands. Mobile has become a central part of the shopping and customer experience and physical retailers are increasingly looking to mobile applications to enhance the involvement of shoppers and other measures of performance.

Brick and Mortar Retail and the Mobile Revolution: How Leading Retailers Convert Phones Into Store Traffic

The smartphone is the most valuable asset inside a physical store, and the retailers winning share understand why. Mobile is no longer a competing channel to brick and mortar retail. It is the connective tissue that determines which physical stores get visited, what gets purchased, and which assortments justify their square footage.

The conventional read frames mobile commerce as the threat that hollowed out the mall. The sharper read, supported by shopper journey analytics across categories from beauty to home improvement, is that mobile now originates the majority of store visits and shapes the basket before the customer crosses the threshold. Retailers treating the phone as a store enablement layer are pulling away from peers still defending channel boundaries.

The Mobile Revolution Has Redefined the Brick and Mortar Retail Funnel

Search, social, and messaging now sit upstream of the store visit. A shopper checks inventory on a retailer app, screenshots a TikTok product, asks a friend over iMessage, and arrives at the store with a SKU already selected. The store’s job has shifted from discovery to conversion and fulfillment.

This reorders what matters operationally. Local inventory accuracy, store-level SEO, click-and-collect throughput, and associate access to the same product data the customer is holding now drive comp store performance more than window displays or end-cap merchandising. Target, Best Buy, and Lululemon have rebuilt store labor models around this reality, treating each location as a fulfillment node, a returns hub, and a service counter rather than a pure selling floor.

According to SIS International Research, shopper journey mapping across apparel and specialty retail consistently shows that customers who engage with a brand’s mobile properties before a store visit convert at materially higher rates and return less frequently than walk-ins, which reframes mobile spend as a store productivity investment rather than a digital marketing line item.

What Mobile Retail Market Research Reveals About the New Path to Purchase

Retailers historically measured the funnel as awareness, consideration, store visit, transaction. Mobile collapsed that sequence into a continuous loop. Shoppers cross-reference reviews while standing in the aisle. They scan a competitor’s price during checkout. They abandon a cart on the app and finish the basket in store the same afternoon.

Capturing this requires research instruments built for the loop, not the linear funnel. In-the-moment mobile ethnography, geofenced intercept surveys, and digital diary studies surface the micro-decisions that traditional exit interviews miss. Sephora, Home Depot, and Walmart have invested heavily here because the data exposes exactly which mobile triggers convert to store revenue and which assortment gaps push customers to Amazon mid-trip.

The sophisticated question is not whether mobile influences the store. It is which mobile interactions are causally linked to incremental basket size, and which are simply coincident with intent the customer already had.

Category Management Optimization in a Mobile-First Store

Shelf space allocation logic built for unassisted browsing breaks down when half the aisle is reading product reviews on their phone. Categories where mobile influence runs highest, including consumer electronics, beauty, and small appliances, reward different planogram choices than categories where impulse and tactile evaluation still dominate, such as fresh produce and seasonal home.

Leading category managers are running assortment rationalization with mobile engagement data layered onto sell-through. A SKU with low velocity but high mobile dwell time often signals a research-then-buy pattern where the store serves as a showroom for an online order. Removing it can suppress digital sales attributed to that trade area. Trade spend optimization shifts accordingly. Endcap value drops for SKUs the customer has already pre-selected on mobile, while in-store digital screens and associate-assisted demos rise in measured lift.

SIS International’s qualitative research with luxury and specialty retail shoppers in the United States indicates that the customer experience inside the store is now judged against the friction-free standard the same brand sets on mobile, meaning store associates, fitting rooms, and checkout are benchmarked against the app rather than against competing stores.

Private Label Competitive Threat and Promotional Lift in the Mobile Era

Mobile transparency has compressed the price umbrella that national brands relied on. A shopper comparing a national CPG product to a private label alternative now sees ratings, ingredient panels, and creator content side by side on a four-inch screen. Kroger, Costco, and Trader Joe’s have used this to accelerate private label penetration in categories where the trust gap has closed.

Promotional lift measurement also looks different. A circular drop that once produced a clean week-over-week spike now interacts with app push notifications, retargeting, and influencer cycles. Isolating true incrementality requires test-and-control designs that account for mobile exposure, not just store-level holdouts. Retailers running this discipline find that roughly a third of measured promotional lift in mobile-influenced categories is attribution noise rather than incremental volume.

DTC Channel Economics and the Store as Customer Acquisition Asset

Direct-to-consumer brands that scaled on paid social have hit a customer acquisition cost ceiling, and the physical store has reemerged as the most efficient acquisition channel for many of them. Warby Parker, Allbirds, and Glossier opened stores not to chase legacy retail revenue but because each location lowered blended CAC and lifted lifetime value among customers acquired in person.

The economics only work when mobile is integrated into the store experience. The store collects the email and the app download. The app retargets the lapsed shopper. The next purchase ships to the home or returns to the store. This loop is what makes brick and mortar retail and the mobile revolution complementary rather than competitive, and it is the model legacy retailers are now reverse-engineering.

An Operating Lens for Brick and Mortar Retail and the Mobile Revolution

The retailers extending their lead share four operating habits. They measure store performance with mobile-attributed revenue included, not stripped out. They staff stores for assisted selling and fulfillment, not pure cashiering. They run category reviews with mobile engagement data alongside POS data. They treat the app, the site, and the store as a single P&L with shared targets.

Source: SIS International Research

Where the Research Investment Earns Its Return

The retailers extracting the most value from brick and mortar retail and the mobile revolution are commissioning research that crosses the channel boundary. Shopper journey analytics that follow the same panelist from app session to store receipt. Ethnographic work inside stores that captures phone use in the aisle. Win-loss research that asks why a basket abandoned on mobile did not recover in store. The output reframes capital allocation between fixtures, technology, and labor.

The competitive position is being decided now. The retailers that read the mobile signal as a store enablement opportunity are widening the gap on those still defending channel walls.

A proposito di SIS Internazionale

SIS Internazionale offre ricerca quantitativa, qualitativa e strategica. Forniamo dati, strumenti, strategie, report e approfondimenti per il processo decisionale. Conduciamo anche interviste, sondaggi, focus group e altri metodi e approcci di ricerca di mercato. Contattaci per il tuo prossimo progetto di ricerca di mercato.