Category: Mobile Payments

Digital commerce experienced significant growth in 2015 due to holiday shopping

E-commerce saw a surge during the 2015 holiday season, with many consumers opting to do their shopping online rather than only visit physical stores. A new report from comScore shows that many consumers took to their computers and smartphones to get their holiday shopping done. Mobile commerce, in particularly, proved to be somewhat popular among consumers, as they saw shopping from their mobile devices more convenient than visiting a traditional retail store.

Mobile commerce is becoming a very powerful force in the retail space

According to the report from comScore, mobile commerce saw significant growth in 2015. The mobile commerce sector grew by 59% over what it had been in 2014, with growth being driven by the number of companies becoming involved in the mobile commerce space and consumers seeing mobile shopping as more convenient. Overall, digital commerce reached $69.08 billion between November 1 and December 31 last year. While this falls below what comScore had predicted last year, this still represents a significant degree of success for the e-commerce space as a whole.

Consumers are beginning to favor the convenience of mobile shopping

Notably, mobile commerce performed better than what comScore had predicted for the holiday season. Many consumers opted to shop for and purchase products that they were interested in with their smartphones and tablets. Retailers had prepared to engage mobile consumers throughout 2015 and found that their efforts had been successful. Due to the success of mobile commerce, retailers are likely to participate more in the mobile space in order to create a more dynamic connection with customers.

Cyber Monday proves to be the most successful day for online shopping

According to comScore, the single largest online shopping day of 2015 was Cyber Monday, which was November 30. During that single day, some $2.3 billion in online sales were reported throughout the retail sector. Companies like Amazon and eBay found the most success in the online retail space, but traditional retailers have also begun to embrace the digital world, create a degree of competition and providing consumers with more options when it comes to e-commerce.

The South Korean consumer electronics manufacturer is taking its mobile payments system into more countries.

Samsung Pay, the mobile payments system that uses NFC technology through the devices from the South Korean tech giant, will now be headed into a broader range of countries across the globe, expanding it well beyond its very limited initial release.

The mobile wallet will be available to consumers throughout a handful of additional countries worldwide.

In a recent tweet, Samsung expressed that while the NFC technology based mobile wallet is already available in the United States and South Korea, it will become available to millions of additional customers in the very near future. This is because it will be stepping into at least three new countries in the near future. The countries that have been identified, so far, include Australia, Singapore and Brazil. This will more than double the number of countries in which the service is available and will provide the company with a considerably larger opportunity to boost its user base.

Samsung followed up the expansion announcement of its NFC technology mobile wallet with more at CES 2016.

At the Consumer Electronics Show 2016, which was held last week in Las Vegas, Samsung also unveiled a new line of NFC enabled smartwatches which would be compatible with its Samsung Pay service. This means that people won’t be limited to smartphones when they want to use mobile devices to pay for their products and service at checkout counters across the new range of countries where it will be available.

The Gear S2 smartwatch will have the mobile technology needed to be able to be used for contactless payments at points of sale that have NFC readers. Upon the initial release of the wearable technology devices, the Samsung Pay service will still be available only in South Korea and the United States. However, as the expansion of the service occurs later in 2016, it is likely that these gadgets will be able to be used there, as well.

This represents a growing trend of wearable technology devices that are becoming compatible with mobile payments. The use of NFC technology in the Gear S2 could help to push forward the adoption of both mobile payments and wearables, simultaneously, if Samsung is as successful as it hopes to be.