What has HSN Inc. done to prepare for what surely must be the most mobile holiday shopping season ever? Only a complete digital overhaul, with the needs of the mobile consumer addressed first and foremost.
“The mobile shopper is one of our highest priorities this holiday season,” Ryan Ross, senior vice president of digital commerce at the TV retailer, tells Internet Retailer. In Q3 2014, mobile commerce accounted for 16% of HSN’s total revenue. (HSN does not break out m-commerce as a percentage of total web sales). “We no longer look at mobile as separate—it’s in everything we do. Mobile commerce has been building all year, and it’s going to be a great holiday season for us.”
HSN already is one of the most mobile retailers today, No. 18 in the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500 with estimated 2014 sales on smartphones and tablets trending toward $548 million. This fall it became even more mobile. It retooled its e-commerce site, transforming it into a responsive design site. Responsive design is a technique that enables retailers to create a single web site using one code base and one set of web content that renders pages to fit the size of the shopper’s screen. This is in contrast to building a separate m-commerce site for smartphones, and perhaps a separate site for tablets, as well. HSN also has released new versions of its iPhone, iPad, Android smartphone and Android tablet apps.
Apps are very important to a mobile commerce strategy during the holidays and year-round, Ross says.
“With the new site and apps, we wanted to improve the shopping experience across all devices, but also drive greater awareness of our apps and increase app downloads,” Ross explains. He declines to reveal the number of times the HSN app has been downloaded. “Customers who use apps are more engaged and more loyal. We’ve seen great results. The mobile conversion rate overall is up.”
While he declines to reveal the mobile conversion rate, Ross points to HSN’s Q3 2014 financial results: The digital business overall grew 13% year over year while mobile commerce grew 46% year over year. The changes have had the greatest impact on the smartphone conversion rate, as responsive design is delivering a much better experience for shoppers on mobile phones, Ross says. He adds conversion has increased for shoppers on tablets, too, but that the big jump has been on smartphones.
A big design change for smartphone shoppers, for example, was the addition of a carousel of rotating deals. HSN is leveraging this new component to promote special deals throughout the holiday shopping season. “We’ve also updated our hamburger menu on smartphones,” Ross adds, referring to the icon that contains three parallel horizontal lines (bun, meat, bun). “That menu now gets consumers to deals and gifts much faster. And of course today’s special.”
During the so-called “Cyber Week” (the week of Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving), HSN will be presenting two doorbuster deals every day that are exclusive to its digital platforms and will not be shown on its TV channel. What’s more, it will offer a third doorbuster deal that consumers can only discover and purchase through the HSN app.
As for responsive design, which HSN slowly rolled out web site section by section beginning in the summer, HSN is quite happy with the results to date, both in terms of and operations.
“It’s easier for us to respond to business opportunities quickly now that we have a responsive design site, where one update translates instantly to all devices,” Ross says. “The clearest indicator is conversion is up. That’s in part because we get customers on mobile devices to products faster. And we can bring the brand to life better through a consistent experience across all platforms. And now we first think about what is the mobile experience, and then translate that for desktop shoppers. With responsive, it’s been operationally much easier to deliver this unified experience across all platforms.”
Ross says HSN currently is experiencing the highest level of mobile activity and mobile commerce it has ever seen, leading up to what he expects will be a smashing fourth quarter.
“Mobile commerce is here to stay, and it’s just going to get more complicated with more screen sizes and more devices,” he concludes. “Maintaining a customer-first, mobile-first point of view will be necessary to be successful in the coming years.”
Follow Bill Siwicki, editor of the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500 and managing editor, mobile commerce, at Internet Retailer, at @IRmcommerce.