Keeping Up With the Shop-Dashians

Over the holidays, mobile commerce was one of the shopping hits of the season, with customers so eager to start shopping on Black Friday that many made a mad rush for their mobile devices on Thanksgiving Day.

An IBM Benchmark report released Tuesday revealed that 14.6 percent of all online sessions on a retailer’s website in December 2011 were initiated from a mobile device, versus 5.6 percent in December 2010. Shoppers bought from their mobiles too, with mobile sales accounting for 11 percent of all online sales for the companies IBM tracked in December 2011, up from 5.5 percent the previous year.

That mobile shopping trend is why the “Prestige 100 Mobile IQ” report released today by L2 Think Tank, part of the New York University Stern School of Business, seems to be a coup for the tech-savvy brands on top of the trend and a wake-up call for the rest. The report ranks the mobile offerings of "prestige brands" in the sectors of beauty/skincare, fashion, hospitality, retail, and watches/jewelry, looking at how "sticky" their mobile applications are and, of course, whether the brands have apps at all.

The top mobile “genius” on the list? Sephora, for whom a “longstanding, iterative investment in mobile pays off,” the report said. Sephora’s mobile site features product videos organized by content type and filterable by brand, as well as a GPS-based store locator, shopping list creator, order history/tracking, and a section for mobile-exclusive offers.

Perhaps the coolest feature: Sephora's iPad app provides a mirror that lets users look at themselves on one side of the screen while watching how-to videos on applying makeup on the other.

Following the LVMH-owned beauty chain on the top 10 list are other "gifted" brands, including: 2. Nordstrom; 3. Macy’s; 4. Net-a-Porter; 5. Bloomingdale’s; 6. (Tie) L’Occitane en Provence; 6. (Tie) Tiffany & Co.; 8. Neiman Marcus; 9. Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts; and 10. Esteé Lauder.

Those that ranked feeble, such as Smashbox cosmetics, Barney's New York, and the jewelery brand Bulgari, might provide a potential client list for mobile-app developer companies like the startup Mobify.

While seven out of 10 luxury brands on the list have set up mobile applications for Apple iOS-powered devices such as iPhones and iPads, less than a third let shoppers buy on the go.

Yet, the report notes, “the user demographics for the iPad and other tablets illuminate the opportunity for prestige brands: 20 percent of individuals with $1 million or more in investable assets own a tablet and spend 50 percent more time on the device than on their smartphone.”

Luxury sales are potentially being lost: Citing estimates from Forrester Research, L2 says that U.S. mobile commerce is expected to total $10 billion this year, up from $6 billion in 2011, and that it will rise to $31 billion by 2016.

Iconic brands that fall low on the list, including Hermès, Patek Philippe, Bottega Veneta, and Marc Jacobs, rely only on their traditional websites, which in some cases are not accessible on mobile devices, the report points out. This is a drawback when it comes to global growth because in emerging markets especially, middle-class consumers use mobile devices to learn about and ultimately buy brands.

The prestige brands have skewed their apps toward iOS, with 70 percent of the apps developed for Apple devices, 22 percent accessible via Android gadgets, 16 percent via Symbian, 7 percent via BlackBerry, and 2 percent via Windows.

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com