Shop Until Your iPhone Drops

CATEGORY PLAYERS LOOK TO GROW VIA MOBILE, ITV, SOCIAL NETWORKS

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 9/6/2010 12:01:00 AM

Cable’s home-shopping networks want to give their fans even more ways to keep the virtual cash register ringing.

Retailers including QVC, HSN, ShopNBC and JewelryTV have embraced strategies to extend the reach of their programming — and digital storefronts — to mobile devices and through social networks. However, there’s a mixed appetite for delving into “t-commerce,” with differing views about whether it’s worth the effort to let TV viewers purchase items using their remote controls.

Mobile has captured the most interest among the shopping networks. Why? “It’s the one device with our customers all the time,” said Brian Bradley, executive vice president of HSN.com and advanced services.

The mobile space is a “game changer,” said Carol Steinberg, ShopNBC’s senior vice president of e-commerce, marketing and business development. She spent 12 years with QVC before coming to ShopNBC last year.

FASTER THAN NET ‘EXPLOSION’
“I was at QVC when the Internet started becoming an e-commerce platform,” Steinberg said. “Mobile will happen much faster than the Internet explosion.”

ShopNBC introduced its first iPhone application in December 2009 and has launched a mobileoptimized website, built in association with mobile-development firm Usablenet. The programmer is now working on enhancements, including adding more video, to its mobile applications. “People are becoming a lot more comfortable using a device for transactions,” Steinberg said. “There’s a comfort level with a mobile device.”

QVC also is bullish on mobile, after introducing apps for iPhones, Android-based devices and BlackBerrys. Next, the network is working up an iPad application that will take advantage of the tablet’s larger display real estate and touchscreen.

“We’ll have a regular cadence of mobile releases,” said QVC vice president of media technology Todd Sprinkle. “It really offers a convenience factor for our customers: If she’s out and about and wants to quickly look up what’s on.”

In addition to apps, QVC has found text messaging to be an effective tool. The company lets users set up mobile alerts for key categories and shows, as well as receive instant information about the item on-air.

HSN provides free apps for iPhone and Android; a mobile website; and a live stream of the linear channel to mobile devices (as well as via the Web). One popular iPhone feature is “shake2shop,” which randomly selects a top-rated item and gives users the chance to win coupons worth up to $100. “It creates additional opportunities to interact with our customers,” Bradley said.

JewelryTV, the Knoxville, Tenn.- based based specialty retailer available in 80 million U.S. homes, is gearing up for a foray into the mobile world this fall, with plans to debut a mobile site and iPhone and Android apps in October.

“We feel like we’re going to go from zero to 60 pretty fast,” said vice president of e-commerce Craig Shields. “We’re not necessarily the first to market, but we know the payoff is there, leading into the holiday-shopping season.”

QVC this summer embarked on a project to develop an interactive TV shopping application, contracting out the work to interactive TV developer Ensequence. The app is to be based on CableLabs’ lightweight Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) specification, designed to run across virtually all set-top boxes in the field.

When the network first looked at interactive TV several years ago, according to Sprinkle, “the cost of entry was high … the cost was higher than the reward.”

Now the economics of building t-commerce services are at a point where it makes sense to do so, he said, and QVC is anticipating staging a launch of the EBIF app with cable operators early next year. It doesn’t have any firm commitments from MSOs, but is in discussions with Comcast.

“It’s got to be easy,” Sprinkle said in discussing the design goals for the app. “It has to be a minimum number of clicks. Remote controls don’t provide the ease of access that a regular keyboard has.”

ShopNBC’s Steinberg believes investing in mobile applications is a much better use of resources. “We feel that if we focus on the mobile devices, we really feel like we’re speaking to the masses,” she said. With interactive TV, “we’re not seeing other benefits other than placing an order quickly.”

HSN currently offers its Shop by Remote interactive application to more than 30 million homes, through Comcast, Dish Network, Verizon FiOS TV and Time Warner Cable Oceanic in Hawaii.

The programmer does not disclose the amount of sales it has generated through HSN Shop by Remote, but executives insist the feature provides a real sales lift and engages many first-time customers who prefer to make their purchases through the TV.

“It is challenging to create the interactive TV experience,” acknowledged John McDevitt, HSN’s vice president of advanced services. “However, the customers are delighted by it. It is the easiest way to transact with our programming. And we really, significantly believe in it — and we hope to grow that.”

SOCIAL ENGINEERING
The shopping networks agree that social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are another promising area that has been largely untapped.

QVC now describes itself as “a global multimedia shopping community,” said Doug Rose, senior vice president of multichannel programming and marketing.

“We’ve evolved from a monologue, on a one-way platform, into a dialogue with our customers,” he said. “We see a future where QVC is just enabling a direct conversation amongst our members.”

QVC’s e-commerce business, which brings in more than $2 billion per year, could grow even more if the company were able to do a better job of “monetizing” platforms like Facebook, according to Rose. QVC has around 173,000 fans on Facebook, and the site is now is the fourth-largest source of traffic to QVC.com.

“What we’ve woken up to, frankly, in the last year is the appetite our audience has for social,” he said. “We’ve been playing catch-up.”

For HSN, social-networking sites are logical extensions of the entertainment aspects of the TV channel as well as a way to better “communicate” with customers, said Bradley. The network promotes brands and personalities such as Hot in Hollywood, Diane Gilman, Serena Williams and Emeril Lagasse.

“The biggest opportunity is this huge collection of additional touchpoints for the customers,” he said. “They say, ‘Give me more.’ We’re able to give that 360-degree view to the consumer.”

The flip side of social media is that a company is opening itself up to criticism — whether warranted or not — from anyone with an Internet connection.

But that’s a cost of doing business, according to QVC’s Rose: “If you don’t enable an open, transparent conversation with your customers they’ll move somewhere else.”

Added Rose, “Not everyone loves every product we sell. Hearing that from customers is all part of building trust with the community.”

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Mike Farrell contributed to this report.