Author: Denny

New mobile payments services comes to the Asian market thanks to PayPal

PayPal has launched a new mobile payments service in order to embolden its presence in the Asian market. Asia has proven quite attractive in terms of mobile commerce due to the growing degree of smartphone and tablet penetration and the increasing number of retailers entering into e-commerce. In order to tap into this promising market, PayPal has launched mo.bi.pay, which stands for “mobile built-in payments.” This new service is designed to appeal to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Asian market shows a great deal of promise when it comes to mobile commerce

Merchants throughout Asia are becoming quite interested in mobile commerce. They have found that consumers enjoy shopping from their mobile devices and those that do so tend to spend more money than those that do not. E-commerce has already won the favor of many consumers throughout Asia, particularly those in China, and this popularity has not gone unnoticed by retailers. Large retail organizations like Alibaba have made a name for themselves in the world of online shopping and are now beginning to focus on mobile commerce.

Services for small and medium-sized enterprises are currently lacking

There are many mobile commerce services that are available for large retailers, but few of these services cater to the needs of smaller groups. PayPal intends to capitalize on this by giving small and medium-sized enterprises something they can use to engage mobile consumers more effectively. Mobile point-of-sale payments are expected to reach $5.4 billion by 2018 and PayPal is keen to ensure that it has positioned itself to take advantage of this aggressive growth in mobile payments.

PayPal works to fend off its competition in the mobile space

PayPal now accounts for 42% of eBay’s total revenue. The company has been purchasing firms that specialize in mobile commerce and technology recently, with its most prolific acquisition being that of Braintree for $800 million. PayPal is working to establish an even stronger presence in the mobile payments space so that it can fend off competition from companies like Google and Square. While Square has focused primarily on the North American market, the company has recently expanded into Japan.

A recent mobile device study has revealed that these passengers are the most willing to use m-commerce services.

According to the results of a survey that was recently conducted in worldwide airports, the passengers traveling through the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta are those who are most willing to use mobile apps for travel purposes.

Among the tasks they were willing to complete via smartphone or tablet is ticket purchasing.

The survey was released by aviation technology consulting firm, SITA. It revealed that more than half (51 percent) of passengers in Atlanta had stated that they would be willing to use mobile apps on their devices in order to purchase tickets. This could open up new doors in m-commerce.

Passengers also stated that they would be willing to use the mobile apps for a number of other purposes.

In Atlanta, about 65 percent said that they would use their mobile devices for making flight changes. When compared to the global average of 47 percent, this was clearly a great deal higher. Furthermore, among the respondents in Atlanta, 60 percent stated that they would have been willing to use their smartphones and tablets to pay for seat upgrades and other forms of ancillary services. On the other hand, the global average willing to do the same was only 39 percent.

This represents a massive increase over the results that were brought in during the same survey last year. At that time, only 35 percent of Atlanta passengers said that they would be willing to use their gadgets for these purposes. This information is likely to be interesting to mobile app development companies as well as in the creation of future forms of mobile marketing strategy.

This latest annual survey was the eighth SITA/AIR Transport World Passenger IT Trends Survey. It was conducted with a participation of 2,489 passengers from 70 countries, who made their way through six of the busiest airport hubs around the world. They answered questions and gave their opinions regarding several digital and mobile apps usage topics. Aside from Atlanta, the airports also included Beijing Capital International, Abu Dhabi International, Frankfurt International, Chhatrapati Shivaji International (Mumbai), and GRU Sao Paulo International.