Imagine if you could fit your business into every customer’s pocket. Imagine you could follow your buyers wherever they went, always available to slot into their lives on-the-go. Imagine delivering marketing content customized to your clients’ activities from hour to hour. The retail world would become a wonderland filled with creative opportunities.
That wonderland is already here, and it’s called”mobile commerce” (AKA M-commerce). The niche has grown so rapidly that it already represents 34% of the e-commerce sector. This year, the industry is set to grow to $666 billion in the United States alone, and the franchise industry is grabbing a large chunk of that number. There are excellent reasons for that: just like your average franchise, M-commerce offers a unified, reproducible retail structure to every franchisee under your brand.
1. Reducing Resources
A mobile phone doesn’t keep your sales floor staff busy or require square footage in a shopping mall. It doesn’t deliver inferior service or require your clients to hit the road in order to buy from it. Smartphones cross borders, delivering a truly global service offering, all the while gathering marketing intelligence to fuel your next branding exercise.
2. Traveling Transactions
Mobile commerce is available when you’re visiting friends and develop a craving for pizza. It’s with you when your car breaks down and you need a repair. Unlike any other form of retail, it delivers service to every corner of the world, and it slots into lives at the point of every need. The distance between initial interest and the ultimate buy has never been shorter.
3. Adding Nuance to Franchising Structure
Expense reduction is one of the key advantages of mobile commerce. Traditional franchises require a lot of resources to build. You must negotiate territories, train every leg of their business, and ship stock to each franchise under your banner. Mobile commerce replaces many of those resources, allowing you to recreate your franchise structure more freely than ever before. You don’t need a thousand stockrooms when you have a mobile store. A single warehouse will do just fine.
4. Payment Security
One in three Americans is frightened of processing credit card payments online. That’s a significant detractor in the industry—one that mobile commerce overcomes. Two-factor authentication and biometrics can ease fears and grow your market share.
5. The Power of Technology
Mobile apps can use automation to market to every client uniquely based on previous purchases and online behavior. This is the era of marketing individuality, and the data it relies on can give you detailed insight into your consumers. Location tracking tells you where they are and how they interact with the world around them.
Mobile commerce can close the gap between franchisors and buyers by involving you directly in every sale. You can standardize your service quality and sales without having to train every trainee your franchisees recruit. With the right development team, you can deliver service excellence the instant a new unit opens its doors.
6. Recruitment Advantages of Mobile Commerce
The average smartphone user taps into their phone 150 times a day, and 51% of them use their mobile technology to find new products and brands. Everything you love about it is equally attractive to potential franchisees. It adds not one, but several selling points to your franchise offering, pushing up your recruitment numbers exponentially.
Mobile commerce relies on a single cross-functional IT, sales, and legal team. You needn’t recreate a carbon copy of it for every franchise unit. The advantages of mobile commerce are delivered to every recruit through the same unified staff complement, no matter how many franchises you sell. Now that’s power.
