A recent ComScore study revealed a positive trend in the use of m-commerce shopping channels.
ComScore has released the results of one of its newest studies. It showed that mobile commerce adoption was on the rise and usage increased by 40 percent. Moreover, mobile recorded a much higher growth than desktop. E-commerce rose by 11 percent during the same span of time.
Overall, the total discretionary retail growth was up by 4 percent during the first quarter of 2016.
The study revealed a 3 percent year over year increase in total digital commerce dollars share held by mobile. The mobile commerce adoption and use share increased from 16.9 percent in Q1 2015 to 18.6 percent in Q1 2016.
Consumers continue to spend only small amounts of money on m-commerce platform purchases. This, despite the fact that they use this method very frequently during the shopping journey. In fact, mobile shopping is considered to be a highly popular mainstream activity. However, data shows that consumers aren’t spending there.
Mobile commerce adoption is rapidly climbing but the spending over that channel isn’t rising as fast.
Consumers spend two thirds (66 percent) of their total retail time on smartphones. Equally, those same consumers spend only 19 percent of their total retail dollars over m-commerce shopping. Conversely, the opposite was true for desktop using consumers. Those shoppers spent 34 percent of their retail time on laptops and desktops. At the same time, they spent 81 percent of their retail dollars on those computers.
That figure represents a gap of 47 percent. Companies may consider evaluating that statistic as the months and years pass.
When it comes to mobile commerce adoption, the holiday shopping season in 2015 played a critical role. Retail traffic skyrocketed over digital channels. M-commerce outpaced e-commerce every single day from November 1 to the end of the year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday both saw well over 200 million visits in the retail category over mobile channels. As a whole, mobile shopping jumped by 60 percent from the 2014 holiday shopping season to that of 2015. There were 8.1 billion holiday shopping visits over mobile apps and 9.8 billion visits over mobile web last year.
Still, shoppers in the millennial generation have yet to be sold on the concept and aren’t yet buying into it.
Social media has been playing an ever growing role in mobile commerce trends when it comes to its impact on consumers as a whole, but when looking at specific demographics, it becomes rapidly clear that millennials aren’t yet all that impressed with what smartphone based shopping has to offer through social platforms.
When it comes to the drivers behind the growth of m-commerce, social media has been highly important.
Brands have been sending a considerable portion of their marketing budgets toward branded content, native advertising and overhauling their mobile apps to improve the experience of shoppers who are continually on the go. That said, there is a considerable difference in the impact of these mobile commerce trends on millennials than there is on shoppers from other age groups. This appears to suggest that the way that millennials want to interact with a brand and the way brands expect them to want to interact with them has not entirely aligned.
Millennial mobile commerce trends show that brands and individuals appear to have different expectations.
The disconnect appears to lie in the place that millennials actually engage with m-commerce. According to recent data from BI Intelligence, consumers in that age group will use those platforms for researching products and services. This appears to be a strong preference over making a purchase through a mobile app.
The BI Intelligence GlobalWebIndex study has indicated that shoppers in the millennial generation will use Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets for looking into products before making a purchase. However, they do not actually make those purchases over mobile commerce channels.
The mobile commerce trends revealed by the study include the estimate that 40 percent of global consumers between the ages of 16 and 24 years old are looking into products via social media. That said, 30 percent of the general population are doing so. Social media is not behaving as a direct product purchasing referral but is instead providing a means through which consumers can educate themselves. Brands that want to encourage purchasing may not find that millennial shoppers are buying through the same platforms they use for their product research, but they will still need to maintain a solid presence over those channels if they want to appeal to those consumers, with Facebook providing the most important influence over shopper decision making.
