Category: Featured News

Retailers in Australia struggle to master m-commerce

Even leading brands in the country are finding it difficult to provide consumers with the mobile experience they want.

Australia’s leader in retail m-commerce is a company called The Iconic, and while that particular brand may be doing well, as a whole, retailers from that country are facing quite a struggle in pleasing smartphone based shoppers.

This, according to the results of a new study that were released by Episerver.

The Episerver study looked into 20 of the Australia’s “bench mark” retailers and assigned them a score based on a range of different criteria. These various factors produced a final score that rated the companies on whether or not the m-commerce experience met the expectations of consumers. There were more than 100 smartphone and tablet users who participated in the survey that led to the final ratings in the study.

The m-commerce rating study, titled the “Episerver Mobile Commerce Report”, placed The Iconic in the top spot.

Australia Mobile CommerceThat company received a mobile commerce experience rating of 66.47 percent. It was able to demonstrate that it had implemented a successful strategy over tablets and smartphones, in addition to effective apps across both of the two largest platforms: iOS and Android. Still, regardless of the highest scores achieved by The Iconic, it was still clear that iPad users still believe the brand’s mobile app could use some assistance, as it received a score of only 49 percent from users of that device.

The brand that came in second was Kogan. That brand’s overall score was not much lower than The Iconic, at 64.96 percent. In third place was OzSale at 57.40 percent. Despite the fact that Catch of the Day was not among the top three, it was the app that received the best score in terms of the iPad app it offered. Equally, even though Kogan was in second place overall, it received the top rating for the mobile website (which scored 73.75 percent overall).

Among the other companies that did well in their overall m-commerce experience were Dan Murphy’s, Lorna Jane and JB Hi-Fi. Still, there were a large number of the overall 20 bench mark brands that did not do well at all. The average score across all 20 of the retailers – including the highest scores – was 34 percent. This was notably lower than the average of all other countries that were surveyed in this study.

First mobile game from Nintendo draws 1 million users in first 3 days

This came as good news for the Japanese tech giant that had been holding onto its policy for only console games.

Nintendo recently announced that the first mobile game it ever launched managed to draw over one million users within the span of three days that followed its initial release.

The first mobile gaming experience offered by Nintendo was in the form of its “Miitomo” app.

The Miitomo mobile game is an interactive experience that makes it possible for users to be able to design their own Mii avatars. It released this app in order to be able to position itself to better compete with its rivals. Through the use of this mobile app, smartphone users are able to change the outfit worn by their avatar through in-app purchases. They can also use their avatars to interact with those that have been created by friends or other mobile application users.

Within the mobile game, the avatars also interact with the user him/herself and share the answer with friends.

Nintendo - Mobile GameFor example, the avatar may ask one of the players of the mobile games what they did over the weekend or “What is your favorite food?” When the player answers, it is shared with the other characters selected by that player.

The game app was originally launched in Japan on a Thursday and by the following Saturday it had already broken the one million user mark, according to a company spokesperson. At the time of the writing of this article, she had also said that there weren’t any updated figures to release. That said, following a national holiday on the weekend of the achievement of the first million users, the stock markets opened on the Tuesday to send Nintendo’s shares upward by a striking 8.18 percent.

The official Twitter account for the mobile game stated that Nintendo had been quite surprised with the number of players who were instantly attracted to the app. As Sony and Microsoft continued to outpace Nintendo’s sales in terms of consoles and related games, the three giants have now moved into the app sphere for mobile devices where they are competing with thousands of other developers with cheap and even entirely free games.