CES: Cars, TVs and Spreading the Buy Around

MobileShopTalk

by Chuck Martin, Jan 8, 2014, 10:02 AM

Some commerce may be completed on a smartphone or tablet although the sale may start elsewhere.

This became apparent through several announcements at CES International in Las Vegas.

Consumers will be seeing more apps in their Chevy dashboards, as we wrote about yesterday  (CES & the Connected Car for Commerce), from which they ultimately will likely be able to start a purchase. The actual sale may take place later as the information is sent to the driver’s smartphone

Also at CES this week, Fandango announced a new service offering movie trailers with fully embedded ticketing capabilities on Samsung Smart TVs.

Consumers will be able to watch the movie trailer on an app on the TV and instantly purchase movie tickets for movies.

At one of the TV sections at the rather massive Samsung booth at CES I got a demo of yet another purchasing process that starts on the TV but can be completed via mobile device.

At the Super Bowl, H&M will be running a commercial with an automated purchase option essentially embedded in the 30-second spot.

Samsung showed me an additional way to use the TV-to-smartphone purchasing option now. In addition to numerous other apps on Samsung TVs, there’s one specifically for shopping, where the Beckman product line is promoted.

A click on the spot triggered a purchase option and when my mobile phone number was entered on the TV screen, I received an instant SMS message with a link to complete the purchase.

What strikes me here is that the triggering of a purchase is starting to be spread around, whether via TV, or car or traditional means.

Key is that the consumer is starting to see a product and the path to purchase is being spread around.  They can buy on the spot or defer to later.

And for that later transaction, they may not be in their car or in front of their TV but no doubt, they will have with them their mobile device.