Carriers Score High in E-Commerce Study

by Allan Pulga

A recent study by Cisco, as reported by Brad Smith from Wireless Week, has found that players in the wireless market are doing a lot of business over the Internet. The study ranked wireless carriers and online retailers on how well they were doing in e-commerce. The carriers made up seven of the top 10 spots.

While carriers and online wireless retailers fared well in the study, Cisco offered a number of suggestions, maintaining that none of them is perfect. 

Verizon Wireless and Carphone Warehouse were tied for first place. Best Buy (Carphone Warehouse’s new U.S. partner) tied with LetsTalk for third place. T-Mobile USA and Cingular tied for fifth, while Nextel, Telecom Italia Mobile, T-Mobile Germany and Vodafone Italy were tied for seventh. 

For added context, Cisco referred to Forrester’s findings: online shopping is expected to account for 10 percent of all retail sales in the U.S. – $323 billion – by 2010. Cisco’s study reported almost half of U.S. households shop online and as many as 50 percent of consumers research products online before buying them in stores. 

The Cisco study was headed by Sailesh Yellumahanti, who said carriers’ e-commerce sites scored high in ease of use and in general content. Functions such as searching for handsets, inquiring about handsets, and processing orders quickly were definite strong points among carriers’ e-commerce sites. 

Weak points, on the other hand, included a lack of “multichannel collaboration,” whereby guided selling tools, interactivity and community dialogue can offer online presence to generate in-store sales. One scenario allows shoppers to order a handset online and pick up at the nearest store. 

The study also found that more than 60 percent of the mobile websites require only three to five clicks to complete a purchase transaction. However, the Cisco said the carriers offer customers poor return processes, such as handing off customer inquiries for return authorizations to multiple parties, being on-hold too long, and not notifying customers of their credit amounts.