Author: Stephen

Retailers could be missing out on a major mobile commerce opportunity

| September 25, 2014

Retailers may not be prepared for the mobile shopping holidays

The holidays are coming and retailers may be unprepared for the proverbial onslaught they will receive from mobile consumers. UniteU, a mobile commerce integrator, has released a new report concerning this problem, suggesting that retailers could face serious challenges when it comes to serving mobile consumers through their websites. The report measures site speeds and their capability to support mobile shopping. UniteU has found that many retailers, including multi-billion-dollar organizations, could fall short of satisfying mobile shoppers during the 2014 holiday season.

Mobile commerce has been performing well during the holiday season

The holidays are an important time for the retail industry. Black Friday is the most active shopping day of the year and serves as an opportunity for retailers to recover from losses they saw earlier in the year. Over the past few years, retailers have been putting a greater focus on mobile commerce, taking note of the growing prominence of mobile shoppers and how much these consumers are spending on products. Several retailers have created mobile websites to accommodate these consumers, but few of these sites are able to serve consumers like they should.

Retailers lack the mobile websites needed to engage consumers effectively

Retail Mobile CommerceThe report shows that many of the retail sites available to consumers are not optimized for mobile devices. This can provide a poor shopping experience for mobile consumers. The majority of mobile payments currently comes from smartphones, which do not use traditional web browsers. Mobile web browsers have trouble deciphering the coding used to make retail websites, so if these sites are not optimized for mobile devices, mobile consumers have trouble using them.

Without optimized mobile websites, retailers could miss out on a significant opportunity

A recent report from Forrester Research suggests that some $26 billion in mobile payments will be processed by the end of this year. The majority of this money is likely to be processed during the holiday season. If retailers cannot optimize their mobile websites by then, they could be missing out on a major opportunity.

Microsoft may be gearing up for a mobile commerce push

| September 23, 2014

Microsoft acquires Iain Kennedy, former payments product manager for Amazon

Microsoft may be getting serious about mobile payments. The company has recently hired Iain Kennedy, who was the payments product manager for Amazon for the past six years. Kennedy has extensive experience in the payments field and his work has helped Amazon find more success in the mobile space. Kennedy is now the product manager of Microsoft’s commerce platform, which may signal that the company is planning to take a stronger approach on the matter of mobile commerce.

Microsoft shows modest interest in mobile payments

Microsoft has a relatively modest interest in mobile payments. The company has dabbled in the field of mobile commerce in the past, but found that the market was too young and volatile to continue putting any serious effort into the sector. Now, consumers throughout the world have become enthralled with the idea of mobile payments, and many are demanding new payment solutions from the companies that they favor. This demand was enough to push Apple into the mobile payments space, but Microsoft’s efforts may be delayed to ongoing concerns regarding security and the viability of the market.

Kennedy could help bring Microsoft into the mobile commerce market

Mobile Commerce - MicrosoftKennedy has been involved in the developed of various mobile payment products. One of the products that he and his team at Amazon created was a digital wallet application, which could be used to make payments from a mobile device. This experience could go a long way with Microsoft, as the company has expressed interest in digital wallets in the past. A mobile wallet that is connected to the company’s gaming platforms could be well received by consumers, but exactly how popular it would be is impossible to say for certain.

New projects have yet to be revealed by Microsoft

While Kennedy has become the product manager for Microsoft’s mobile commerce platform, his work with the company may be completely unrelated to mobile payments. There has been no information given about the products that he will be working on, apart from the suggestion that they could change the way people buy and sell products in the real world.