Mobile payments continue to see strong growth throughout India, largely due to the availability of mobile wallets

India’s mobile commerce ecosystem is maturing at a rapid pace. In 2015, consumers throughout the country began realizing the benefits associated with mobile payments technology. The most notable benefit of this technology can be found in mobile wallets, which serve as digital versions of their physical counterparts. These wallets can be used to store a wealth of information, including financial details and special deals being offered by merchants. Mobile wallets have helped power the growth of the mobile payments space in India.

Mobile wallets have become quite popular with consumers

Currently, there are 12 mobile wallets available in India, coming from Paytm, MobiKwik, Oxigen, M-Pesa, and mRupee. Throughout India, some 125 million people use these mobile wallets, with Paytm accounting for the largest share of these consumers. Research and consultancy firm RNCOS recently released a study concerning the mobile wallet market in India. The study found that Indian consumers are quite interested in mobile payments, which has lead to a dramatic rise in the demand for digital wallets.

Mobile wallet market expected to reach $183 million by 2019

According to the study from RNCOS, India’s mobile wallet market currently stands at $53 million. The market is expected to reach $183 million by 2019. Several companies are beginning to provide mobile payments services to consumers. As more people gain access to smartphones and tablets, they are becoming more active in the mobile commerce space. This has created an incentive for retailers and other businesses to support mobile payments in order to effectively engage consumers that are becoming increasingly mobile-centric.

More consumers are gaining access to smartphones and bank accounts

Some 400 million new consumers will have smartphones and bank accounts in the near future, making India a very attractive mobile commerce market. Retailers and financial institutions are expected to take advantage of this by offering new services that appeal to the needs of consumers. Competition may ensure that innovation comes to the mobile payments market, allowing mobile wallets to become more capable than they are currently.

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.

comScore 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.