Oasis recently revealed that its iPhone app has been downloaded 24,549 times over a four month period.

As previously mentioned, I’m surprised that more retailers aren’t exploiting the fact that mobiles are a useful tool in joining up the communication between online sites and stores, helping to educate and engage directly with the customer. Apps can be used to tell customers when product is in stock, when promotions are on, when the latest looks have just landed and for price compare and purchasing.

I recently spoke with e-business consultancy Portaltech for a Retail Systems feature on online retail, during which they talked about their Stripeylines product and price compare app. This works with iPhones and a retailer’s barcode information, to make this available to the customer. For example, a customer in HMV could use Stripeylines to scan a CD they want, listen to it through their iPhone, then choose to buy either in-store or online or through another vendor.

This sort of development is a great example of why mobile commerce is shaping up to be an essential marketing tool that all retailers and brands need to embrace. The likes of Oasis are way ahead of the curve in this respect. Yet many others are still not convinced of the viability of the mobile channel. There is no best practice for the less innovative companies to follow at this moment in time and there is an glaring lack of experience. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Passing through Liverpool Street station recently, I came across a HMV Shop in a Box. These contain DVDs and games and are being trialled at train stations and Vue cinemas. In theory, this adds another string to HMV’s multi-channel bow. But in reality, it’s something of a damp squib. I’m all for an innovative vending machine but I can see a couple of problems with these boxes.

Firstly, you have to register before you can buy anything. I wasn’t overly keen on tapping in my personal details as the rush hour crowd flowed by, but did so anyway (purely out of journalistic curiosity, you understand). I then discovered that it takes a while to find the title you want, lacking the personal touch of the High Street store and the interactivity of the website.

A neat idea, then, but in its current form I’ll be surprised if it catches on.

Self-service equals queue busting, right? Not at Marks and Spencers, Finsbury Pavement. The store recently pushed through a major roll-out of self-service checkouts, but rather than busting those tedious queues, it appears to have exacerbated the problem.

Customers want to buy and get out of the store. They don’t want to be kept waiting. It is frustrating and the real killer is that long waiting times become associated with your brand, rendering a repeat visit less likely. Pop along to the Finsbury Pavement branch between 12-2pm and you will be greeted with queues snaking around the store - a long line of unhappy shoppers, bemused and annoyed that they’re being asked to undertake an epic journey just to catch a glimpse of the newfangled checkouts.

I’m a big M&S fan. Their stores are normally well run and highly efficient, but somewhere along the line they’ve got self-checkout wrong at the Finsbury Pavement branch. The machines may well be here to stay, but it’s clear that self-service still carries with it a number of potential pitfalls.

As a follow up to my blog post of 12th February (UK retail far from Twitterrific), good to see Cineworld using its Twitter page this week to request feedback on The Daily Mail/Kiss Ass debate.

For those of you who haven’t come across this story, The Mail has once again worked itself up into a frenzy - this time with a story headlined ‘Jonathan Ross’s wife Jane Goldman causes outrage with film featuring a foul-mouthed 11-year-old assassin’. Said film, based on a comic book series about a boy who decides to become a superhero and the vigilantes he encounters, represents everything that is wrong with modern society. And Ross’s other half is also involved, which makes things even worse. If there’s one thing The Mail hates more than kids who swear and carry guns, it’s Wossy.

By Tweeting on this, Cineworld came across as being on the ball, interested in what its followers had to say and it also raised awareness of a forthcoming release. This Twitter lark is easy when you know how, right?

Marks and Spencer is aiming to become the world’s most sustainable retailer by 2015, as it launches 80 new commitments under its eco and ethical initiative, Plan A.

There’s an old joke, about a guy who thinks that ethics is a county outside London, which could be applied to the retail sector and its poor environmental reputation. Motorways full of half empty lorries, shelves stacked with over packaged goods and mountains of plastic bags at the checkouts. They’ve all made their fair share of damaging headlines.

Indeed, it often feels that M&S is plowing a lone furrow when it comes to environmental retailing. But that’s a tad unfair on an industry that is beginning to change and flout its environmental credentials. There’s an argument that, in the fast moving world of retail, time spent on managing energy use etc is time not spent on exploiting other opportunities. But that is blinkered thinking, failing to take into account that addressing sustainability can also bring cost savings. M&S has said that Plan A, launched in 2007, has saved it £50 million in efficiencies so far. To quote Sir Stuart Rose: “We believe sustainability is a key ingredient of business success and that Plan A will continue to make us more efficient, develop new markets and build customer loyalty. It’s therefore not just the right thing to do morally but also makes strong commercial sense.”

Save the planet whilst saving cash - what’s not to like?

Following on from my blog last week about Books Etc’s return as an e-tailer, the site launched on Monday, 22nd February. And promptly crashed. The official line is that they’re fixing “urgent issues that have arisen as a result of overwhelming demand for our services.” Whatever the reason, to say it doesn’t look good would be an understatement on a par with ‘Ashley Cole has an eye for the ladies’.

As of today, the site is still down with visitors encouraged to follow progress (or lack of it) here. It doesn’t bode well when you’re trying to crack a market dominated by Amazon - a slick, ruthless book selling machine if ever there was one. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps not the best idea to hand responsibility for running the site to Legend Press, which previously received stinging criticism for its ill-fated collaboration with peer review venture, YouWriteOn.

Books Etc’s travails give me a good excuse to mention research released by Hostway and Zeus Technology. Eighty two per cent of those surveyed said that if a business’ website performed badly it would dissuade them from buying goods from that organisation both online and in-store. In fact, online retailers are potentially losing up to £5.65 billion per year in lost sales as customers abandon transactions due to poorly performing websites.

Last year UK retail consumers spent £38 billion online. Yet it is clear that many people still have disappointing experiences when shopping online. If a site crashes two days after launching, citing unexpectedly high traffic, customers will vote with their feet. They won’t hang around on the promise of ongoing work to make it ‘bigger and better than ever!’ (to quote the aforementioned Twitter page).

The Guardian iPhone app, which comes with a £2.39 price tag, has generated more than £240,000 and been downloaded over 100,000 times since its launch in December.

Those figures got me thinking about retail and the iPhone. It’s good to see several retailers climbing aboard the smartphone bandwagon, such as Next, Ikea, Ocado, Amazon and LoveFilm. Tesco has been particularly active here, launching a store finder and Clubcard app and most recently a wine finder app. You can see how the latter, which uses Cortexica Visual Search technology, works here.

Where to next for the grocery giant? The possibilities are, as they say, endless. For instance, the customer could use their phone to take a photo of a product and have it identified along with the SKU, enabling them to add it to their shopping list while they’re on the move.

I’m surprised that more retailers haven’t launched iPhone apps. Why the wait? I’m referring in particular to Sainsbury’s. I found this thread on the Discuss with Sainsbury’s forum. It’s clear that customers want one and yet the official line appears to be: we’ve passed it onto the guys in the marketing department so let’s wait and see.

Not the first time that Tesco has stolen a march on Sainsbury’s, I guess.

Can it really be a year ago that the Retail Systems blog was launched? Time flies…

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the blog, read my ramblings and provided feedback. It’s very much appreciated.

On a final note, my very first post, covering the collapse of the Retail Business Show, asked if there was a need for another retail technology-related exhibition. There has been an interesting development in this area and I’ll blog on that in the near future.

In the week that online shopping growth reached a record low and the latest e-Retail benchmark study from eDigitalResearch showed multi-channel retailers outperforming pure plays online, some interesting news from Books Etc. It’s coming back as an, erm, e-tailer.

The name and website were bought by The Capital Organisation in January, following the collapse of parent Borders UK, and the site is set to go live on Monday. According to the promotional blurb: “Building on the important Books Etc brand, www.booksetc.co.uk will be the first major books retail site with a clear focus based on personality, efficiency and loyalty.”

Really? I guess this could be the case if we conveniently ignore Amazon, who have proved to be pretty handy when it comes to personality, efficiency and loyalty. Not to mention Waterstone’s and The Book Depository, the retailers it will go toe to toe with.

It’s possible that the revamped Books Etc will carve a decent little niche for itself, but anything more in a notoriously tough sector? I seriously doubt it.

Further info on the eDigitalResearch study at: https://ecustomeropinions.com/survey/survey.php?sid=465281795

B&Q and John Lewis offer their customers the best levels of website accessibility out of the top UK High Street retailers, according to a new study from Webcredible.

The user experience consultancy’s 2010 E-commerce Accessibility Report also reveals that Marks and Spencer’s website, newly launched in October 2009, only managed to increase its accessibility score by one per cent to 59 per cent to remain in 12th place. This despite drastically improving its usability score with the redesign, to top Webcredible’s E-commerce Usability Report in October 2009.

Currys again propped up the table, achieving a score of only 37 per cent. In addition, Woolworths scored 38 per cent to finish in 19th place, despite now having become an online only retailer. As someone who recently utilised the Currys and Woolworths sites, I can’t say I’m surprised by their lowly rankings.

The main finding of the report is that accessibility is not considered as important as usability in site build and developments. “It’s clear that a lot of work has taken place on existing and redesigned sites to improve usability, but it seems in all this work many retailers have failed to take accessibility seriously enough,” says Trenton Moss, director at Webcredible.

A copy of the report can be downloaded at: www.webcredible.co.uk/accessibility2010