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M-commerce brought $12.7 billion in sales to retailers over the holidays

| January 15, 2016

According to figures released by comScore, smartphones played a notably larger role in overall online shopping.

comScore has released its holiday shopping data and has revealed that m-commerce generated $12.7 billion in sales, while online shopping as a whole brought in a tremendous $69 billion.

These figures show that mobile commerce is growing fast but desktop shopping is growing slower than predicted.

This revealed that it really was m-commerce that was dominating the scene in terms of growth rate during the holiday season. This growth rate was considerably larger than that of PC based purchases. Moreover, it was also pointed out that regardless of whether or not a sale was made, the traffic that was seen on websites was greater on mobile devices than it was on desktops and laptops. Smartphone based shopping also rose rapidly from 2014 to 2015. In fact, comScore recorded the rate of growth during that span of time as being 59 percent.

This shows very rapid growth for m-commerce, though not as quick as what some had forecasted.

m-commerce - huge holiday salescomScore recorded that the total e-commerce sales that occurred from November 1 through December 31, 2015 came to an estimated $69.08 billion. That research firm had previously predicted that the figure would have been closer to $70.01 billion during that span of time.

While mobile commerce did manage to exceed the forecast that comScore had put forward, desktop didn’t manage to do the same thing. Instead, it fell short of the predicted total by close to $2 billion. Once again, the largest single day for online shopping was on Cyber Monday, which fell on November 30, last year. On that one day, there were $2.3 billion in sales completed online.

That said, while there are a large number of analyses being released with regards to the totals in sales of e- and m-commerce, many analysts are saying that it is short-sighted to try to think of the sales as occurring either on one type of environment or another. Instead, many reports are starting to acknowledge that the line between online and offline sales, and the line between PC and mobile devices is quite blurred as consumers will often cross from one environment into another and, perhaps, back again before a final purchase is made.

Wearable technology will be used by half of consumers for mobile payments

| January 14, 2016

Gartner has predicted that by 2018, about 50 percent of shoppers will use wearables or smartphones to pay for purchases.

Research firm, Gartner Inc., has released a recent prediction that wearable technology will play a tremendously larger role in mobile payments over the next few years, saying that half of all consumers will be using them or smartphones for that purpose by the close of 2018.

This forecast has come at a time in which mobile payments are still only just gaining initial adoption.

In markets such as Japan, North America and many countries throughout Western Europe, mobile payments remain a small but growing transaction technology. Gartner feels that by 2018, they will have become popular enough that fifty percent of consumers will be using their smartphones or wearable technology devices in order to complete transactions at checkout counters in retail stores and restaurants.

This also suggests that Gartner feels that wearable technology will also be growing in its popularity.

Wearable Technology NewsAccording to Gartner principal research analyst, Amanda Sabia, “Innovation in apps, mobile devices and mobile services are impacting traditional business models, particularly in the way people use personal technology for productivity and pleasure.” Sabia also pointed out the importance that product managers come to understand who these shoppers actually are when it comes to catering to new devices and providing services, while discovering just how those gadgets are being used by those customers. “Knowing your customer is imperative in order to capture a fair share of spending opportunities in this dynamic marketplace.”

There were three types of mobile payments that were described by Gartner within its recent report. It identified them as: wearables or smartphone based payments, branded mobile wallets from credit card issuers or banks, or branded mobile wallets from retailers.

Still, Gartner reported that those mobile payments services based on NFC technology – such as Android Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay – will remain limited throughout the length of the forecast period simply because the partnerships between retailers and financial organizations for using smartphones and wearable technology in that way will not yet have been established. Moreover, consumers have yet to see the value in that type of payment transaction.