Tag: holiday mobile commerce

According to a recent Shopgate report, retail needs to appeal to smartphone using consumers.

Shopgate, a highly recognized m-commerce business solution, has released a report called the “2013 Holiday Guide for Online Retailers”, which provided the top 10 recommendations for success, this holiday season.

Among those points, the focus on catering to smartphone users was a considerable one.

What was explained by Shopgate in its report was that retailers should start acting right away to make their way into m-commerce if they haven’t already prepared their strategy for the upcoming holiday shopping season. It is no longer enough to focus on online shopping in general and as a whole. Instead, a focus also needs to be placed specifically on the mobile channel.

In fact, when it came to getting into m-commerce, the recommendation was “do it now!”

The report from Shopgate pointed out that m-commerce traffic is not only already representing more than 20 percent of all American internet traffic, but it is also expected to exceed desktop based internet traffic by the end of next year. The holiday season is predicted to be the transitional time into that exceptional rate of growth to the point that it will be greater on smartphones and tablets than it is on laptops.

The report pointed to a number of m-commerce findings from several recent studies.

For example, it pointed out that shopping over m-commerce is expected to reach $42 billion by the end of this year, and that it will make up a larger segment of e-commerce than has ever been experienced before, according to eMarketer.

In fact, the report went to the extent of saying that retailers that choose not to take part in m-commerce may be actively choosing not to take advantage of an important source of revenue. It pointed to data from Econsultancy, which indicated that 62 percent of businesses that have created a website that is specifically optimized for smartphones and tablets, had increased their sales. The recommendation for the upcoming holiday season was to use mobile friendly elements such as: coupons, push notifications, ad scanners, daily deals, QR codes, mobile SEO, and product categories.

According to the latest Hipcricket survey, this channel will show its true value before the end of the year.

Although the holiday shopping season has become synonymous with crowded malls and waiting in tremendous lineups once the perfect items have been found, mobile commerce is predicted to begin a sizeable change in this tradition, this year.

The prediction is that many more shoppers will be looking to their smartphones and tablets to skip the lines.

Moreover, shoppers will also be using mobile commerce to be able to hunt for the products that they want and find the best prices so that they can buy them in store, reducing the amount of time that they will actually spend going from one brick and mortar store, so that they can beeline to exactly what they want. Not only will they be purchasing gifts over smartphones and tablets but they will be finding them and tracking them down before buying them in person.

This is according to the latest mobile commerce data that has been released by Hipcricket.

The Hipcricket study has shown that 53 percent of the participants in its holiday shopping study intend to spend a larger amount over mobile commerce in 2013 than they did at the same time in 2012.

The report stated that “Hipcricket survey data shows that 42% of respondents will shop more on mobile devices this holiday season compared to 2012. This means that the total number of mobile purchases should increase significantly, as the survey also found that in the past six months, close to 59% of smartphones users made at least one purchase on their device.”

It also went on to say that mobile commerce will contribute to the overall sales made in over different channels from traditional online shopping (over desktops or laptops) and in store. They said that there will be two ways that smartphone and tablets will be contributing, and that is a driver of sales, as people shop over the devices themselves, and as a research tool that will send people directly into the stores or to their traditional computers where they will complete the transaction based on what they found on the smaller screens.