Internet Retailer presents the inaugural class of its Top 10 Mobile Commerce Chiefs, pioneers who have created some of the most successful mobile sites and apps. Retailers across the board can learn from these 10 innovators, and pay heed to what they identify as the next big mobile challenges.

This year, traffic to retailers from smartphones and tablets surpassed traffic from desktops and laptops; further, mobile devices now dominate time spent by consumers with online retail. What’s more, mobile sales by the 500 leading retailers in m-commerce worldwide combined with the m-commerce sales of marketplace eBay Inc. will hit $117.78 billion in 2014, up 77% from $66.56 billion in 2013; mobile sales will account for nearly 22% of total web sales racked up by the 500 merchants and eBay in 2014, according to the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500.

Mobile commerce has come so far, so fast, in part because of many highly innovative, almost prescient executives who steered their retail organizations toward mobile early and quickly. They tested and learned, and at the same time made gambles on technologies. They are intelligent and intuitive, and have logged notable successes for their organizations while many other retailers play catch-up.

Today, Internet Retailer reveals its inaugural class of Top 10 Mobile Commerce Chiefs, the 10 brightest, most innovative mobile minds in online retail. They are (in alphabetical order by retailer name):
  • Richard Cohene, director of marketing, Beyond the Rack.
  • Steve Yankovich, vice president of innovation and new ventures, eBay Inc.
  • David Katz, senior vice president and general manager of mobile, Fanatics Inc.
  • Annie Trombatore, head of product, JackThreads.
  • Thomas Parkinson, co-founder, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Peapod LLC.
  • Todd Sprinkle, vice president of content and platform innovation, QVC Inc.
  • Arash Hadipanah, senior mobile product manager, RueLaLa.com.
  • Tim McCauley, senior director of mobile commerce, Walgreen Co.
  • Gibu Thomas, senior vice president of mobile and digital strategy, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
  • Geoffrey Robertson, vice president of product, innovation and business integration, W.W. Grainger Inc.

Retailers across the board can learn plenty from the experiences and creations of these 10 mobile executives. And Internet Retailer tells their stories in an exclusive, new, 26-page special report. To download this free report, click here.

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“What we’ve seen in the last 12 months in online shopping is a sea change,” says Katz of Fanatics. “Consumers are now comfortable using their smartphones as their primary shopping device. Mobile-first went from a catchphrase to reality in the blink of an eye.”

Cohene at Beyond The Rack sure knows that.

“For us, mobile is 53% of revenue on the weekends and 43% on weekdays—those are huge numbers, and I expect mobile revenue to be in the 60s on weekends in 2015,” Cohene says. “Today, every piece of code, every touch, every color, every pixel is considered on mobile. Your mobile customer experience and your visibility into what is happening on these devices is mission critical. Look at these mobile-only companies today like Uber and what they’re doing with the mobile experience. Look at how they design these wonderful apps that can help us in our daily lives. Look at Apple Pay, and the potential it has to change commerce. All these amazing things are happening in mobile, and we’re just scratching the surface. And I guarantee, in online retail, the desktop will become the minority in terms of revenue.”

The Top 10 Mobile Commerce Chiefs is the first in a new series of free, downloadable special reports focused on mobile commerce, dubbed the IR Executive Report/Mobile Series. While this first mobile report honors the top executives in m-commerce, the next report will focus on the increasingly important role played by commerce-enabled mobile apps (42% of the $83.78 billion in 2014 mobile sales by Internet Retailer Mobile 500 retailers, or $35.52 billion, will stem from mobile apps).

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Follow Bill Siwicki, editor of the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500 and managing editor, mobile commerce, at Internet Retailer, at @IRmcommerce.

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