Category: Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce security not as important as convenience for holiday shoppers

| December 7, 2016

A Trustlook survey showed that consumers will ignore certain risks in exchange for easy shopping.

Mobile commerce security is an important issue this holiday season. Seventy one percent of smartphone owners plan to use their mobile devices to help them along some point of the shopping journey.

Trustlook has recently released a survey with results from which it has made its holiday predictions.

The Trustlook survey focused on smartphone users with Android phones. The goal was to accurately forecast consumer behaviors throughout the holiday shopping season this year. What they found was that 40 percent of the survey participants actually prefer shopping over smartphones. This despite the mobile commerce security concerns that have been holding back the channel’s adoption.

Mobile Commerce Security - Shopping via smartphoneAnother 18 percent of the survey participants said that their preference was to shop in-store during the holidays. The results revealed that 43 percent of smartphone users will be making over $250 in purchases over their devices. The top m-commerce apps were identified as Amazon, eBay and Walmart.

That said, shoppers haven’t taken adequate mobile commerce security steps to protect themselves.

Even though 70.35 percent of participants in the survey said they planned to make a purchase over a smartphone or tablet, they were not protecting their personal and financial data. In fact, a wide majority of people hadn’t even installed security software. Sixty four percent of survey respondents did not have a mobile security app installed on their device.

Trustlook CEO, Zllan Zhang, said “Mobile shoppers need to be more cautious than ever,” adding that “This risk isn’t going away as mobile shopping activity ramps up.”

This is an interesting finding as concerns over mobile security have been among the top cited reasons that people have held off shopping over smartphones. It appears that there is a growing group of people who are moving ahead with smartphone based shopping regardless of that potential issue.

The hope from security firms is that if consumers are willing to ignore the mobile commerce security risk, they will at least take more steps to protect themselves. There are several small steps such as security apps that can help to keep sensitive data safer.

In store mobile payments were few on Black Friday

| December 6, 2016

Cayan data revealed that Americans didn’t turn to their smartphones to complete transactions very much.

Transaction processing firm Cayan showed that in store mobile payments in the United States were low on Black Friday. Fortune Magazine reported on the data and indicated that even though mobile wallet use is rising, it is still tiny. That payment method represents only a very small percentage of the overall total.

In fact, the mobile wallet use in store on Black Friday made up only 0.6 percent of sales.

The Cayan in store mobile payments data suggests a 100 percent year over year usage increase. However, it still shows that the percentage it represents of the total is only just a fragment above being entirely insignificant. The only reason that percentage meant anything at all was because the total sales on all payment methods on Black Friday was such a large figure.

In Store Mobile PaymentsDespite that fact, this makes it very clear that mobile payment adoption remains an exceptionally slow process. It is far from being mainstream as of yet.

Other data has shown that some in store mobile payment methods are more successful than other.

PYMNTS and InfoScout data showed that the use of the Apple Pay mobile wallet is actually declining in popularity. Their data revealed that over the last year, the growth rate for usage has slowed down.

Data from October 2016 showed that only 23 percent of consumers with an appropriate iPhone had actually tried the mobile wallet. That was essentially the same statistic that was recorded back in March 2016.

Moreover, mobile wallet use while in-store has not been doing much better. It has not been keeping up with the rate of growth of m-commerce as a whole. Still, even though there is a low conversion rate, PayPal recorded some strong figures over the holiday weekend that launched the shopping season. About 1 in 3 online purchases using PayPal were made over mobile.

Similarly, Adobe recorded that 45 percent of traffic to retail sites came from smartphones and 25 percent of e-commerce sales were from mobile devices. This suggests that customers are using their smartphones, they simply aren’t using in store mobile payments quite yet.