BOSTON – At eTail East 2016 last week, retailers and vendors discussed how, as the crucial holiday shopping season approaches, they are expecting a surge in mobile traffic and are working furiously to uncover strategies for turning that traffic into sales, something that continues to be a challenge on mobile.

While traffic on mobile continues to grow, many retailers still have not seen that potential turn into revenue. Right now, optimization is key, as users have now come to expect a performance with no issues.

Product discovery and checkout are at the top of retailers’ concerns for the upcoming holiday season. The easier it is for users to find what they are looking for and make a purchase, the more they will be likely to spend, which will be key in the next few months.

Here is what eTail East 2016 attendees said about mobile opportunities and challenges for the upcoming holiday season.

Dean Vegliante, president of Netmining
Our clients are very interested to see if their mobile dollars are equating to actual sales, because conversion tracking is still not 100 percent with mobile, it can be difficult to see if there are efficiencies with allocating a large portion of their spend.

We’re excited to see how our marketers are finely embracing a true audience cross-device strategy. As we enter this holiday season, we are making huge strides in understanding how to provide meaningful analytics that speak to performance. Areas include: in-store analytics, multiple touch points across devices that lead to conversions and areas to complement creative messaging to provide a quality customer experience.

Dan Revellese, vice president of sales for Blue Triangle Technologies
Our clients are concerned about the low conversion rate on mobile devices and looking for ways to improve the revenue from this channel. Using Blue Triangle, we are measuring how page load time performance is impacting the decision to buy on mobile (and desktop). By quantifying the revenue impact of performance, we are helping our clients improve their mobile conversion rate.

Camilla ley Valentin, chief commercial officer and cofounder at Queue-it
As peak shopping increasingly moves onto mobile, and with the growing focus on the improved conversion rates on apps as opposed to mobile sites, we are seeing a drastic increase in demand for our recently launched app queue system. Even the best app will sometimes suffer from slowdowns during peak times with massive user loads, and the importance of a personal, fair and smooth waiting experience in line to enter the mobile/app store is becoming a central component in the overall queuing strategy.

Rob Tull, director of solutions at Classy Llama
With the increased focus on omnichannel solutions and the expectations of consumers to be able to get products where and when they want them, there is a lot of focus going into helping consumers find products in the physical store and enabling app-to-store solutions from the mobile device. Also, with the proliferation of new solutions like Apple Pay, there’s a new focus on streamlining the in-app purchase process to make things simpler and easier for consumers on the go.

Rachel Hess, account executive at NewStore
This holiday season, our brands have expressed the need for easier purchase on mobile as the channel becomes more popular. Conversion rates are still low and the brands we speak to believe that easier paths to checkout (Apple Pay, formless checkout, etc.) as well as better data on their high value customers for more accurate marketing will lead to better conversion rates.

Allison Vavra, account director myThings
This holiday season, we have noticed that the brands have put together a huge effort to make it easier to purchase on mobile. By doing this, they are hoping to get improved conversion rates and overall growth during the busiest shopping season of the year.

Glenn Shoosmith, founder and CEO of BookingBug
We are seeing a significant trend towards retailers using their physical locations to offer in-store experiences, events and classes to provide value to their customers in a way that Amazon simply cannot. This trend is picking up pace as we head towards the holidays, and we’ll increasingly see retailers using their Web and mobile assets to promote these in-store experiences through targeted marketing campaigns.