As Sears Holdings Corp. continues to shift its focus to being more of a membership-driven retailer, mobile is playing a key role in enhancing member engagements in store and online. The strategy appears to be working, with Sears reporting that 70 percent of sales are now made to Shop Your Way members, and that number continues to grow. Mobile is instrumental in driving these results, with mobile members engaging with the retailer at a significantly higher rate than customers who are only engaging in store or from a desktop.

Frozen yogurt chain Menchie's tapped mobile to turn the airing of an Undercover Boss episode featuring the chain's CEO into a new customer acquisition campaign and saw a nearly 30 percent redemption rate. Viewers of the Oct. 25 episode were invited to text the keyword Menchies to the short code 35350 to receive a text offer for a free 5 oz. serving of yogurt. The chain's CEO Amit Kleinberger appeared in the episode, posing as an Menchie's new-hire and observed the inner workings of the company.

On November 11, China's largest online shopping festival - the equivalent of Cyber Monday in the US - took place. On the two largest e-stores, Alibaba-owned Tmall and Taobao, Chinese consumers spent $5.7 billion in a single day, setting a new record for global e-commerce. On rival site Jingdong, people spent $1.6 billion over its longer promo period, which lasted 11 days. These massive numbers made news headlines around the world. However, most stories overlooked the most significant aspect of the event - 25 percent of all purchases on Alibaba's e-stores were made using mobile devices. That's a strong indication …

US Bank has developed a new application that is meant to serve as a mobile commerce platform for consumers. The application is designed to allow consumers to quickly purchase products that they may come across in their daily lives. In this way, it is quite similar to other applications of the same nature, but the application is able to provide information on products using image recognition and audio. As such, the application can be used to bring up a list of products based on a print or radio advertisement. The application is available to US Bank customers that have a …

Although figures continue to show that a mobile commerce flash sale, and that the channel as a whole, has great potential for success and that they are becoming more mainstream, there are still people who doubt that this effort is a worthwhile one. The latest example to show that these doubts are unfounded has been presented by Maybelline New York. As we recently reported, a mobile commerce flash sale was the next step for a massive launch of a partnership between the Line Japanese messenger service and Maybelline New York, which occurred in Thailand. The mobile marketing promotion involved bringing …

With mobile marketing delivering a significant boost for some brands, money-losing Red Lobster - which is being spun off and having its marketing budget slashed - should take a close look at mobile to help it reduce marketing costs while driving value and loyalty for customers. At the same time that other casual, full-service restaurant chains such as Outback Steakhouse, Chili's and Applebee's are committing to mobile marketing, Red Lobster has remained loyal to a strategy of lavish - and expensive - television ads featuring close-ups of steaming hot plates of food. With Red Lobster's sales down around 4.6 percent, …

Bon-Ton Stores Inc. has announced its first gift card New Year promotion, offering a mobile coupon for shoppers who redeem gift cards on New Year's Day. Customers that redeem a gift card in-store on New Year's Day will receive an extra 10 percent off their purchase. Consumers can access the coupon and saving offer on New Year's via Bon-Tons mobile-optimized site or mobile application. "Bon-Ton wanted to encourage customers to take advantage of the gift cards they received for Christmas and be able to use them during the big New Year's Sale," said Luis Fernandez, executive vice president and chief …

UK-based e-retail payment service provider Realex Payments has signed a partnership agreement with m-commerce specialist MoPowered. The deal seeks to enable online merchants to exploit mobile sales opportunities. Realex e-commerce customers will be able to use MoPowered's mobile marketing, operations and payments software to target mobile device users. Realex's merchants can now access a suite of mobile payment services. MoPowered's partnership with Realex is expected to support merchants' omni-channel strategies and increase the commercial opportunities created by the increased smartphone and tablet adoption.

Successful by every other measure, profitability continues to elude Reddit. After nearly 9 years of operation, however, the self-described "Front Page of the Internet" is testing ecommerce in the hopes of finally falling in the black. “If Reddit Gifts, as the burgeoning bazaar is known, brings sustainable profitability, it would mark a turning point for an outfit that has exerted an outsized and sometimes controversial influence on Internet culture yet languished financially,” Reuters reports.

Singapore's telecommunications firms need to find new avenues of growth in the year ahead. Industry analysts said driving mobile data consumption will be a key focus for Singapore's telcos in 2014. And the firms could look into collaborations with industries such as healthcare and transport to increase sources of data growth. Digital services like mobile commerce are potential growth drivers for telcos in the coming year, with consumers increasingly using smart devices for payments. Nitin Bhat, partner and head of consulting at Frost & Sullivan, said: "(Consumer) behaviour is driven by the entire digital technology. The way telcos look at …