Android Pay is now available in the United Kingdom

Google has officially launched its new mobile payments service in the United Kingdom. The company is looking to compete with others in the mobile commerce space with its Android Pay platform, which has found modest success in the United States. This is Google’s first entry into the mobile commerce market, of course, as it released its Google Wallet platform some years ago. The rapidly changing market has pressured Google to launch a new service, however, which is where Android Pay comes into play.

Mobile commerce is growing quickly in the UK

The United Kingdom is a very attractive market for mobile commerce. Many consumers in the country are using their smartphones to shop online and purchase products in physical stores, taking advantage of the services that are available to them. The Android Pay service is the latest such service, which can be used by those with accounts with most of the UK’s major banks and credit card issuers. A growing number of retailers are beginning to rely on mobile payments services as well, which is creating new opportunities for platforms such as Android Pay.

Android Pay continues to fight for a foothold in the mobile commerce space

Android Pay was launched last September in the United States and Google notes that it has signed 1.5 million people up for the service every month since then. Despite this, however, Android pay has struggled to find a foothold in the country. While the service is equipped with effective security features, many consumers in the United States are still not comfortable with the concept of mobile commerce. This is not the case in the United Kingdom, where many people have shown favor with being able to pay for products with their mobile devices.

Google to face more competition in the UK

Android Pay has managed to attract significant support from businesses in the UK, but it will still have to compete with other, more established mobile payments services in order to find success. One of Google’s major competitors in this market is Apple, which launched its own payments service in the UK in July of last year. Samsung, another player in the mobile commerce field, is also coming to the UK with its own payment service in the near future, which will further increase competition.

Even leading brands in the country are finding it difficult to provide consumers with the mobile experience they want.

Australia’s leader in retail m-commerce is a company called The Iconic, and while that particular brand may be doing well, as a whole, retailers from that country are facing quite a struggle in pleasing smartphone based shoppers.

This, according to the results of a new study that were released by Episerver.

The Episerver study looked into 20 of the Australia’s “bench mark” retailers and assigned them a score based on a range of different criteria. These various factors produced a final score that rated the companies on whether or not the m-commerce experience met the expectations of consumers. There were more than 100 smartphone and tablet users who participated in the survey that led to the final ratings in the study.

The m-commerce rating study, titled the “Episerver Mobile Commerce Report”, placed The Iconic in the top spot.

That company received a mobile commerce experience rating of 66.47 percent. It was able to demonstrate that it had implemented a successful strategy over tablets and smartphones, in addition to effective apps across both of the two largest platforms: iOS and Android. Still, regardless of the highest scores achieved by The Iconic, it was still clear that iPad users still believe the brand’s mobile app could use some assistance, as it received a score of only 49 percent from users of that device.

The brand that came in second was Kogan. That brand’s overall score was not much lower than The Iconic, at 64.96 percent. In third place was OzSale at 57.40 percent. Despite the fact that Catch of the Day was not among the top three, it was the app that received the best score in terms of the iPad app it offered. Equally, even though Kogan was in second place overall, it received the top rating for the mobile website (which scored 73.75 percent overall).

Among the other companies that did well in their overall m-commerce experience were Dan Murphy’s, Lorna Jane and JB Hi-Fi. Still, there were a large number of the overall 20 bench mark brands that did not do well at all. The average score across all 20 of the retailers – including the highest scores – was 34 percent. This was notably lower than the average of all other countries that were surveyed in this study.