Mobile and E-Commerce Get U.K. Retailer Attention

For the first time ever, top retailers' priority for information technology investment is e-commerce and mobile commerce, according to the latest annual IT in Retail research of the UK's leading 100 retailers by Martec International, sponsored by BT Expedite.

The study of retailers with annual sales totalling more than £180 billion, representing 50,000 stores and 71 per cent of the total UK retail sector, which is valued at £254 billion.

The main IT investment priority for leading retailers is e-commerce and mobile commerce, growing from 17 per cent last year to 23 per cent this year, outdoing investment in store systems, which has been the focus for the previous nine years.

In many ways, those moves are the inverse of the growing efforts by many other companies, inside and outside the ecosystem, to shift from online commerce to physical location retailing. Retailers, in part, want to harvest more sales from the online channel. Many other participants want to create new sales platforms that use online tools and applications to capture more of the retail transaction volume.

In many ways, both trends represent a deepening of the "bricks and clicks" strategy that developed in the wake of the first big wave of e-commerce starting in 1999.

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