Category: Featured News

New mobile commerce solution will roll out to 20,000 retailers in the UK

Barlcays has announced that it has formed a partnership with Verifone in order to launch a new mobile commerce solution that is meant to be rolled out across 20,000 retailers. The solution will incorporate Barclay’s Pingit as a payment method, allowing retailers to better engage mobile consumers. Verifone’s mobile commerce gateway will act as a tool for retailers in the United Kingdom, which may bolster the adoption of mobile shopping among consumers.

New solution will incorporate Pingit into Verifone’s mobile commerce gateway

The 20,000 retailers that are expected to make use of the new mobile commerce solution will join 70,000 others that are already using Pingit as a payments solution. Merchants that specialize in the digital space may find this particularly beneficial, as more consumers are beginning to use their mobile devices to shop online rather than visit physical stores. The solution may prove quite powerful during the upcoming holiday season, as many consumers have begun opting to do their holiday shopping online in order to avoid large crowds at retail stores. Mobile shoppers also have access to special deals that could help save them more money.

Adoption of smartphones leads to a greater number of mobile shoppers

Mobile commerce has been growing quite rapidly throughout the United Kingdom. With more consumers gaining access to smartphones, they are finding that using these devices to shop online is more convenient than visiting a physical shop. This is especially true among consumers with long commutes, as they can shop for products online and have their purchases delivered to their homes. Physical stores are also supporting mobile payments, of course, and the new mobile commerce solution is expected to provide better support for retailers that want to engage mobile consumers in the physical space.

Barclays and Verifone work together to resolve issues facing mobile commerce

According to Barclays, one-fourth of consumers who attempt to purchase products through a mobile device experience issues with their transactions. Approximately 55% of consumers have abandoned a mobile purchase because of these issues. Barclays and Verifone are working together to resolve these issues in order to ensure the continued growth of mobile commerce in the UK.

Those advertisements that have become a nuisance to the mobile web may be vital to its existence.

Among the frustrations that are the most common about the mobile web are the ads and automatically playing videos that cause us to have to wait excessive amounts of time for a page to load, but the ad blockers that have been providing relief from that experience may now be threatening the existence of some websites.

The reason is that many free sites depend on the display of advertising for their livelihood, to make them worthwhile.

iPhones and iPads now have the opportunity to be able to use apps that function as ad blockers and millions of mobile device users have chosen to download and install those applications to speed up their experience on the mobile web while avoiding annoying accidental ad clicks. At the same time, websites and publishers often depend heavily on advertising revenue in order to make their very existence worthwhile, as the ads pay for the amount of time that is put into maintaining them.

This has some sites watching the rise of ad blockers with bitten-down nails as their primary income is threatened.

Advertising revenue is vital to companies ranging from tiny to giant such as Google, The New York Times, and Hulu. While panic has yet to set in for the majority of websites, they certainly have their eye on this trend and some websites are already working hard to be able to reduce any annoyance that their ads may be causing so that their regular users won’t be driven to ad blocking altogether.

According to the Harvard University director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, Joshua Benton, “It is possible to be too alarmist about ad blockers, but it’s a very real phenomenon.” It all depends on the proportion of mobile device users who opt to install these apps. He explained that there will be a very big difference between having 5 percent or 80 percent of iPhone users installing these mobile apps.

He cautioned that if advertising practices become too annoying, it could lead consumers to take action through ad blockers in order to make them disappear, going the way of the pop-up window (a technique that is automatically blocked by many browsers due to user frustration).