Mobile spending grows, but retailers miss out on a significant opportunity

The 2013 holiday shopping season has proven to be quite successful for most retailers and brands. A recent report from comScore show that online spending passed $46 billion during the holiday season while another report from the National Retail Federation notes that overall spending reached $601 billion. Mobile spending has grown significantly in 2013, but Jumio, a market research firm, has released a new report that suggests that mobile commerce has missed a major opportunity.

Mobile commerce misses out on $16 billion

According to the report from Jumio, mobile commerce missed out on $16 billion over the 2013 holiday season. Overall, the report shows that mobile spending has grown, but many consumers have reported a lackluster experience with their shopping experience. Mobile shopping platforms from retailers were launched late last year in order to attract the mobile audience, but these platforms were hastily developed and some were crippled by glitches that prevented people from purchasing products.

Abandoned carts may be the culprit behind the loss of revenue

The problem may lie with abandoned shopping carts. Carts are quite common in e-commerce and they serve as a place where products are stored before the checkout process has been finalized. Jumio suggests that consumers running into significant problems on mobile commerce platforms often caused them to abandon their online shopping carts. In many cases, platforms failed to store product information properly, causing consumers to abandon their digital shopping carts and start the process from the beginning.

Poor shopping experience cause consumers to drop mobile commerce

The report shows that some 51% of consumers opted to abandon their digital shopping carts because of security reasons. These people did not believe that a mobile commerce platform would be capable of keeping their financial information safe.  Some 47% abandoned carts because of difficulties regarding mobile payments, while 41% claimed that a mobile commerce platform they were using was simply too difficult to manage. Another 23% of consumers reported that their transactions would not go through during the checkout process, causing them to seek out more convenient forms of shopping.

Hybrid PayTech is now working with Smart eMoney to provide the country with smartphone transactions.

The announcement has just been made by Hybrid PayTech World Inc. that it has partnered with Smart eMoney Inc. (SMI), the Smart Communications Inc. financial services subsidiary in order to provide Philippines with new mobile payments options and services.

The two companies are collaborating for a brand new transaction platform ecosystem.

The purpose of this new platform is to give retail and enterprise businesses in the Philippines with new mobile payments opportunities. This new agreement will have SMI using the HybridVIRTUO Ecosystem platform for rolling out a new smartphone friendly point of sale system. This will include a range of different solutions that are touted as being easy to integrate with PoS systems that are already in place.

The platform will make it possible for SMI to deploy a complete mobile payments suite for businesses.

This system will be designed for a wide range of device compatibility, to work with mobile devices based on Android, iOS, BB, and Windows 6, 7 and 8. The platform from Hybrid, which makes it possible for interoperability from multiple types of devices is based on audio-jack or Bluetooth transaction acceptance units.

It will give SMI clients the ability to receive transactions through mobile PoS MasterCard credit cards. This is designed to make accepting the cards and the processing of the transaction quick and convenient.

There are also plans in the works to make it possible for SMI to offer online debit through the use of a PIN system. This would make it possible for smartphones to be used for transactions through Philippine Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cards. Other mobile devices that could be used for this purpose will be tablets and mobile enterprise devices.

Beyond being compatible with all major smartphone platforms – as well as the major and local device brands – the mobile payments system is also compliant with Payment card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). That is the worldwide security standard that is meant to help to considerably reduce the risk of data fraud through the evaluation of account data security and an assessment of the network architecture of an organization, in addition to its security policies, software design, its procedures, and its protective practices.