Category: Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce sparks major growth in the retail sector

E-commerce is growing in China, backed heavily by an interest among consumers in mobile commerce. Jingdong Mall, the country’s largest online retailer, has announced receiving more than $700 million in funding from a consortium of investors that are interested in the company’s prospects in e-commerce. The funds are expected to help expand the company’s digital operations and new business ventures. Jingdong Mall is not the only retailer that has been seeing heavy investment activity recently. Several others have been finding success through a stronger focus on mobile commerce and the consumers enthralled by mobile technology.

Transaction volume growing quickly due to online shopping

According to a recent report from the E-Commerce Research Center, digital payment volume in China’s retail sector has been growing aggressively. By the end of December, 2012, online transaction volume in the retail market reached more than $160 billion, a growth of more than 64% over what this volume had been in 2011. The number of online shoppers has also increased in the country, reaching 247 million consumers by the end of 2012. Many of these consumers made purchases throughout the year using their mobile device.

Consumers show favor for mobile shopping

The growth of mobile commerce and e-commerce is expected to have a significant impact on physical retailers in the coming years. Many of these retailers in China has begun making the transition toward e-commerce, with tentative plans to abandon their old brick-and-mortar shops at some point in the future. Those that have no plans to embrace e-commerce may find some success through the adoption of mobile commerce, but this success may be short lived as consumers begin to favor online platforms for shopping.

Internet connection proves to be a problem for mobile commerce

The development of mobile Internet continues to gain speed in China. As consumers gain access to better Internet connections, they will be more likely to participate in mobile commerce. Currently, slow load times for e-commerce sites and digital retail services keep many consumers from participating in mobile commerce. The retail sector is working to alleviate this issue, however, in order to capitalize on the prospects of mobile consumers.

Estimates reveal that these two operating systems have a 91 percent control over the market.

Analysts from the International Data Corporation have revealed their latest technology news estimates following the sales of mobile devices in the fourth quarter of 2012, which have shown that Android and iOS made up 91.1 percent of all smartphone sales.

This shows that nine out of every ten devices is based on Google or Apple’s operating system.

Between those two companies, the technology news for Android is the most positive, as it is that operating system that holds the top spot. In fact, during the last quarter of last year, almost 69 percent of all smartphone sales were devices that ran on Google’s mobile operating system. There were approximately 500 million smartphones sold based on Android in 2012. At the same time, Apple sold approximately 136 million devices, giving it a 19 percent share of the smartphone market.

The technology news for Apple was greatest in Western markets.

The reason that its numbers increased as quickly as they did wasn’t because of any top technology news releases such as because of a brand new device. Though the excitement related to the iPhone 5 release did contribute, many of the device sales were of the iPhone 4 and 4S, which had lower prices when they were no longer the latest devices from the manufacturer.

In terms of the market share held by other companies, the sale of BlackBerry devices dipped by over 36 percent last year. It should be noted that the recovery of that company did not happen until after this study was complete, as the BlackBerry 10 was only released within the last few weeks. It is, therefore, difficult to gauge the current position of that operating system in the grand scheme.

Microsoft phones were estimated to be at the bottom of the top four operating systems. Their latest technology news statistics placed their market share at 2.5 percent during the last quarter of 2012. It remains difficult to determine where the market shares will be by the end of this year, as considerable partnerships and releases will certainly occur between now and that time.