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More mobile commerce sales share goes to Android phones this holiday season

Lucy | December 4, 2014

While the iPhone has always been the top smartphone for shoppers, its share is declining.

Traditionally – if one can use that word in the young world of mobile commerce – the largest number of sales have, by far, come from iPhones and iPads, whose owners have made far more and far larger purchases over their mobile devices than their Android gadget using counterparts.

However, this trend is shifting and over the last year, Android has gained a lot of ground in m-commerce sales.

In fact, recent data that was used in a report put out by BI Intelligence has shown that Android is rapidly closing the mobile commerce sales share gap in a number of different ways. The report examined a number of the trends that have occurred since the last holiday shopping season and has discovered that there have been notable changes in the average order value (AOV), the conversion rate, and the order share when it comes to mobile devices on these two most popular platforms.

These mobile commerce trends are important as they help to guide marketers and retailers in targeting their experiences.

Mobile Commerce - Android Sales The report indicated that Android is closing the m-commerce sales gap quite quickly. Among the ways in which serious changes were made over the last year are the following:

• Average order value – The average AOV over Android phone was $120, which was much closer to the average iPhone order at $129. The gap between tablets didn’t appear to shrink in any meaningful way.
• Conversion rate – Monetate stats showed that there was a 0.7 percent conversion rate with Android visitors, which was lower than the iPhone rate of 0.9 percent, but that was much closer than last year.
• Order share – About one in five sales on the Custora m-commerce platform was from Android based devices, a notable increase, particularly as the share from iPhones dropped at the same time.

The mobile commerce report also indicated that as Android becomes a more important commercial platform, it is not only taking a larger share of the space previously occupied by iOS based devices, but it was also seen to have been taking up more of online shopping as a whole.

Mobile gaming is becoming increasingly attractive to Indian consumers

Lucy | December 1, 2014

The marketplace in India is starting to experience the same level of “app fatigue” being seen elsewhere.

A recent study conducted by Forrester Research in India has shown that consumers will be spending a growing amount of time on their devices, but will be using fewer apps, with a preference for mobile gaming over other types of applications.

The app fatigue that is being seen in other regions of the world is clearly setting in within this country.

This trend has been especially notable in developed markets such as the United States, and Forrester Research stated that it will not take over as quickly in India for a while. The report was entitled “Predictions 2015: Most Brands Will Under-invest In Mobile”. It showed that while device users in India may be showing signs of app fatigue, their love of mobile gaming remained strong.

The report showed that mobile gaming will be, to some extent be immune to the upcoming wave of app fatigue.

Mobile gaming - India consumers The report indicated that smartphone apps are going to start to become less popular among Indian mobile device users, but at the same time, mobile games will start to increase in popularity, to a certain degree. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the average smartphone owner will use an average of 24 apps every month, but 80 percent of their time will be spent on only five of those, as a result of app fatigue.

According to iVoice Ventures’s Venky Vaiyapuri, though many smartphone users are downloading applications, many of those apps will go unused. There are also many applications that remain entertaining only when they are new and that become boring over time. Vaiyapuri explained that there are simply too many apps and this is not appealing to consumers.

He used Angry Birds as an example. While many people download that mobile gaming application, not many will use it or will continue to use it over time. He stated that “We will soon follow the US and UK markets and lose interest in downloading apps.” A Vodafone India spokesperson added that India hasn’t yet reached the level and energy of monetization seen in developed markets.