About 40% of flash-sale e-retailer Beyond the Rack’s sales come from mobile devices, Richard Cohene, the company’s director of marketing, told attendees at the 2014 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition.
In 2013, the retailer did $160 million in web sales, landing Beyond the Rack at No. 169 on Internet Retailer’s 2014 Top 500 Guide.
Cohene says the company decided to go mobile first with a mobile-optimized site because a consumer does not need to download or open an app to engage with the brand. “There is no barrier to the mobile web,” he said. “The web was that first step to being mobile-friendly.”
More than half of the retailer’s 12 million daily e-mails are opened on mobile devices, both smartphones and tablets. Beyond the Rack rolled out mobile-optimized e-mails in July 2013 to all of its 9 million members and discovered mobile-optimized e-mails improved the click-through rate by 15% and revenue per e-mail by 7%.
Just because the retailer went with a mobile commerce web site first doesn’t mean it abandoned apps. As of today, Beyond the Rack has an app for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. Cohene said each application is designed specifically for the device a shopper uses to access it. That means the apps for an iPhone and iPad are different. “They should be brothers but not identical twins,” Cohene said. “They each have their own benefits.”
Beyond the Rack’s customers also have different spending habits on different devices. Customers completing a sale on the mobile commerce site spent an average of $50 before Beyond the Rack rolled out changes specific to Apple Inc.’s iOS platform. Now they spend an average of $75.
But that amount is still far less than what customers using desktop and tablet devices spend. On average, desktop customers spend $100, while tablet users spend an average of $170.
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