Sephora finds promise in focus on mobile commerce

Mobile commerce has been a very strong boon to the retail industry. Beauty products specialist Sephora has seen major gains through its focus on mobile commerce and consumers with mobile devices. Sephroa director of mobile and digital store marketing Johnna Marcus notes that the company saw a significant increase in mobile orders over the past year, as well as an increase in mobile traffic. The company is expected to see similar results in 2013 as it continues its focus on mobile commerce.

Company sees 167% spike in mobile orders

According to Marcus, Sephora saw a 167% increase in mobile orders in 2012 and a 75% increase in online traffic from mobile devices. The company attributes these results to its ongoing campaign to engage consumers through a variety of mobile initiatives and services tailored for mobile commerce. One of the measures Sephora has taken to engage mobile consumers comes in the form of an application, which provides users with an array of “personal assistant” features that could be useful in shopping.

Retail mobile commerce expected to account for $37 billion in 2013

A recent report from eMarketer, a leading market research organization, predicts that consumers will purchase more than $37.44 billion in retail goods this year. All of these purchases will be done from either a smart phone or tablet, thanks to the growing variety of mobile commerce services being made available to consumers. Sephora expects to see a significant number of its sales come from the mobile space.

Sephora not alone in focus on mobile commerce

Sephora is not the only retail company that has high hopes hinging on mobile commerce. Indeed, mobile commerce seems to be all the rage within the retail industry, with many companies working on ways to directly engage mobile consumers and encourage mobile shopping and spending. Much of the interest surrounding mobile commerce in the retail industry may come from the strong results retailers saw during the 2012 holiday shopping season, when many of their most ambitious mobile commerce initiatives paid off.

The company has announced a number of smartphone friendly transaction services.

Telefónica’s German international wireless carrier brand, called Telefónica Deutschland, has just announced that it will launch a new smartphone-to smartphone direct money transfer and service as well as mobile payments wallet service.

The goal of the company is to propel the world forward toward a cashless society.

According to the Telefónica Germany CEO, René Schuster, “Soon, children will only know from history books what a wallet and hard cash are.” He added that “Mobile payment with your smartphone has arrived in Germany. Our customers will soon be transferring money mobile-to-mobile and paying in shops using their digital wallet.”

The new peer to peer service will be the first of the mobile payments services that are launched.

This will occur in February by way of a wireless carrier. This element of the mobile payments offerings will be called mpass. By using mpass, smartphone users will be able to make money transfers to other mpass accounts in real time. All the sender will need to know about the recipient is her or her cell phone number. The company has stated that the process is very user friendly and is a free service.

The app to use mpass will be made available to users of devices based on both iOS and Android operating systems. It will require a one-time registration the first time that the service is activated, but the information will be saved after that point so that it does not need to be re-entered.

Beyond the initial mobile payments launch of the P2P service, Telefónica Deutschland has said that it will also offer consumers their O2 Wallet. This is a smartphone wallet that will function using NFC technology in order to allow contactless transactions to occur at a participating merchant’s point of sale. This service will use the PayPass technology from MasterCard in order to provide secure credentials confirmation and payment data from the NFC chip equipped smartphone to the reader device at the register.

Telefónica Deutschland consumers will be sent a new free NFC pack that includes an NFC SIM card so that they will be able to download the app, register, and use these mobile payments and wallet services.