More consumers are opting to shop via mobile devices

Mobile commerce is beginning to see aggressive growth in Southeast Asia. The Asia Pacific region has become one of the most attractive and fastest growing mobile payments markets in the world, with companies from all over the world flocking to the region to take advantage of this fact. A new report from Criteo shows that Southeast Asia, in particular, is seeing significant growth in terms of mobile shopping and the availability of mobile payment services. This is partly due to consumers becoming more comfortable with the basic concept of mobile commerce.

Report shows that mobile shopping is growing in many Southeast Asian countries

The report from Criteo shows that mobile payments account for approximately 40% of all transactions made among digital retailers. In the fourth quarter of 2015, mobile transactions accounted for 25% of all payments being made in the digital space, with countries like India, Singapore, and Thailand experiencing the strongest growth in mobile payments. Among mobile shoppers, smartphones where the favored purchasing platform.

Smartphones have become the favored shopping platform among consumers

Smartphone purchases accounted for approximately 73% of all mobile commerce sales in Southeast Asia. Tablets accounted for only 27% of these transactions. Consumers had favored tablet devices in the past because of the larger screens that these devices feature. The shopping experience was also relatively more enjoyable than what consumers experienced with smartphones, as retailers had developed services that performed better on tablets. Now, however, consumers are favoring smartphones because of their small size and how much more convenient they are when compared to tablet devices.

Security remains one of the greatest concerns that mobile shoppers have

While mobile commerce is growing quickly in Southeast Asia, many consumers remain concerned about the security of their financial information when making mobile purchases. As mobile shopping becomes more popular, hackers are beginning to target this sector in order to gain access to consumer financial information. Retailers and companies responsible for mobile payment services have been addressing security issues in order to secure the continued growth of the mobile commerce space.

A recent data analysis has found that retailers, brands and restaurants will be spending more on smartphone ads.

Digital savings experience, RetailMeNot Inc, has recently released its report on a recent study it conducted, titled “The Rise of Mobile Marketing Spend in Retail,” in which it stated that restaurants, retailers and brands will be investing more of their advertising budgets in the smartphone channel.

The study looked into the responses of over 200 retail marketing execs with authority over ad budgets.

The most notable point from this study was that among all the participants in the survey, 87 percent said that they had the intention to make a larger investment into mobile marketing this year. This was the case across all the different retail categories. It was noted that the marketers were shifting the way the budgets would be spent, sending more toward mobile ads and other smartphone based opportunities, while withdrawing funds from certain other more traditional channels.

This trend toward mobile marketing occurs as consumers engage less often with print newspapers, catalogs and TV.

According to RetailMeNot CMO, Marissa Tarleton, “We’ve seen increased interest from our retail partners working to better understand how mobile marketing channels like RetailMeNot can help them drive brand awareness, traffic online and in-store, and ultimately sales.”

She also pointed out that retail marketing leaders have been looking to make larger investments into digital media by way of mobile advertising. Attribution capabilities are assisting in allowing those marketers to gain a more thorough understanding of the overall positive impact of what they spend in this area.

Tarleton underscored the fact that the outcome of this survey only further supports the feedback that RetailMeNot has already been receiving from its retail partners. Such feedback includes the opinion that many traditional marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to move as quickly as is necessary toward a new mobile marketing direction while still being able to take the necessary time to go over the metrics and understand what is or is not paying off in terms of the impact their investments are actually having. It looks as though the challenges of this transition are highly commonplace.