Tag: mobile holiday shopping

Mobile commerce reaches fever pitch during holiday season

The holiday season is settling in and mobile startups may stand to see major success this year as they engage mobile consumers in a new way. Keynote Systems, a developer of measurement products for mobile communications, has released a new study highlighting mobile startups. The study, called “Keynote Startup Shootout Index,” sheds some light on numerous startup retail organizations and how well they are accommodating the needs of mobile consumers. Given the growing importance of mobile commerce, ensuring that mobile users have a favorable experience through a retail platform is becoming a more important issue.

Retail startups putting focus on site performance

According to the study, retailer RueLaLa boasts of the best mobile performance than its competitors. The retailer offers fast load times for those accessing its website from smartphones and tablets. While the retailer’s website may not be ideal in terms of speed, as it receives an average of 38 new requests as the website loads, it does enable mobile consumers to access information on products more quickly than its competitors. This makes it relatively easier for consumers to purchase products online.

Loading times can greatly affect mobile commerce

Loading times have a significant impact on mobile commerce. The longer it takes to load a website, the less likely it is for a consumer to enjoy their shopping experience. Long loading times can lead to frustration that can derail any mobile commerce initiative. Loading times for mobile websites tends to become significantly problematic during the holiday season as the more people that access a website tend to put significant strain on the site’s servers. If consumers cannot access a retail site, they cannot actually purchase any products.

Success of mobile commerce provides encouragement to retail startups

Mobile commerce has inspired a new generation of retailers to enter into the field. Retail startups have placed a strong focus on the mobile sector. This is partly due to the success that many retailers saw during the 2011 and 2012 holiday season through their focus on mobile commerce. In order for retail startups to find this same degree of success, they must ensure that people can access their websites quickly and that these sites offer an enjoyable experience.

According to a recent comScore report, online shopping this year will be bright for smartphones and tablets.

comScore has, once again, released its predictions for the holiday shopping season, and for its predictions of 2013, it has pointed out that mobile commerce is going to have a very bright opportunity, particularly on Cyber Monday.

Although there is a shorter season this year, when compared to last year, the decline should be only “slight”.

Although many have wondered if the fact that there is nearly a week – 6 days – less this shopping season from this Thanksgiving to Christmas, when compared to last year, comScore believes that there will be only a “slight decline” in the overall growth rate that will be experienced in a typical year. Moreover, it has predicted that when compared to the powerful sales that are experienced over mobile commerce and online shopping, this decline will even be noticeable.

Once mobile commerce has weighed in, it is likely that the year over year growth will be 14 to 17 percent.

comScore’s predictions have shown that this will allow mobile commerce to reach its highest percentage ever achieved out of the total online shopping, this year. The figures that they are predicting are that smartphone and tablet based sales will represent 12 to 13 percent of online shopping, and that the spending will near $10 billion for the last quarter of this year.

Mobile commerce has already reached record high percentages of total online spending within the last three quarters of the fiscal year, this year. It is being anticipated that this trend will keep up for the remainder of 2013 and that it will leap beyond last year’s total digital commerce spending, which was 11.3 percent.

According to the report from comScore, “We have seen that in periods of concentrated consumer activity, a greater number of people are likely to engage in emerging behaviors, such as mobile commerce.” Taking into consideration the fact that this short shopping season has six fewer days than it did last year, the analytics firm has predicted that purchasing will be far more concentrated and will therefore expand the need for tools such as smartphone and tablet based shopping.