We were delighted to announce earlier today that Halfords (the UK’s leading specialist retailer for automotive parts and accessories, cycling and leisure) has launched its first ever transactional mobile website, a project we have been planning and working on since the summer.  The project builds on the success of Halfords’ dotmobile site, which went live in August 2010 and is reported on here.

Since the launch of the dotmobile site, Halfords has seen mobile visitor numbers increase to 8% of Halfords’ dotcom total. Conversion levels have also doubled.  However, the announced enhancements enable customers to pay for orders via their mobile phone.

Chris Corbin, Head of Multichannel at Halfords said:

“More and more of our customers are accessing our site via mobile and we want them to have the same experience as they have from a computer. Smartphones point to how trends in shopping habits are changing fast.”

What was pioneering about this project was that the initiative makes Halfords the first retailer in the UK to offer such a variety of delivery options via a smartphone.

To support true cross channel shopping habits, mobile customers have access to Halfords’ extended range of products – but importantly the same fulfilment options that are offered on the main Halfords.com site, offering a compelling and ultimately valuable shopping experience. This means that mobile customers can choose from a variety of ways to shop;

In addition, mobile customers can search for products, read customer reviews, compare products, and find their nearest store with stock.

Payment for goods, a hot topic in mCommerce circles, also saw the Halfords and Salmon teams provide customer choice.  Shoppers can pay by credit/debit card, or by using PayPal; the same payment methods supported by Halfords.com.  In another first, Halfords is the first mass UK retailer to offer PayPal as a mobile payment method.

For those readers who like even more detail, the mobile platform was developed using the same underlying architecture as Halfords.com, namely IBM WebSphere Commerce. Developing the transactional capability involved complex integration by Salmon between the mobile site, DataCash and PayPal to offer 3-D Secure.  Salmon also integrated the mobile site with Multimap (now Bing Maps) , SAP and Store6.