Category: Tablet Commerce

Whether retailers are ready or not, smartphone is going to have a considerable impact on consumers.

As is the case every year, holiday shoppers in 2014 will be looking to find the very best deals, and mobile commerce will be playing a very important part in that, regardless of whether or not the actual purchase is made over smartphones and tablets.

A growing number of pre-holiday survey results are starting to be released and they show that consumers want m-commerce.

One of the top consumer desires has been shown to be the ability to use their devices in order to price products and look for deals. Mobile commerce is more than simply making an online purchase through the use of a smartphone or tablet. According to a Google Consumer Surveys study that was conducted on behalf of Thinknear and that involved the participation of 1,000 adults in the United States, one in every three holiday shoppers plans to use a their devices to check prices.

Even before a shopper leaves his or her home to hit the stores, mobile commerce will play an important role.

The recent survey showed the following activities for which consumers expect to use their mobile devices during the upcoming holiday shopping season:

• Price comparisons (32 percent)
• Researching ideas for gifts (31 percent)
• Reading product reviews (27 percent)
• Looking for deals such as sales and coupons (25 percent)
• Creating a shopping list (22 percent)

These are very interesting statistics and reflect the type of behavior among consumers that retailers are going to want to take very seriously if they want to be able to get the most out of the holiday shopping season.

These results also reflect those that were revealed within the American Express Spending and Savings Tracker study that had been conducted by Ebiquity. Within that research, it was shown that the leading activities to be expected in online and mobile commerce during the holidays will be price comparisons, checking out ideas for gifts, and locating the best deals. These studies showed that these activities may be conducted before leaving to shop, or could occur while in store.

Smartphones are rapidly taking over a larger share of the purchases that are being made over the internet.

According to recent statistics, it looks as though it won’t be very long before nearly all of the online shopping going on in India will be made up of mobile commerce based activities.

This data is according to one of the largest e-commerce companies in India, Snapdeal.com.

Snapdeal.com is now predicting that 90 percent of its orders will be purchased on its websites by users of smartphones, as those mobile devices become more affordable and make it possible for a growing number of people to reach the internet. This will bring millions of new customers exclusively to their website via mobile commerce. That marketplace has already been seeing massive increases in its figures as a result of this channel.

Mobile commerce will, therefore, become the most important online shopping channel in India in two years.

Over the last year, Snapdeal.com, which is an online marketplace backed by eBay, has experienced a rise in m-commerce based purchases that has brought it to the point that it is now thirty times larger than it had been only twelve months ago. It has already reached the point in which nearly 70 percent of its orders are already being made by consumers who are accessing the websites by way of smartphones and tablets. According to the chief executive and co-founder of Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl, that percentage will only continue to increase.

Bahl explained that “It’s a tsunami of users over mobile phones.” He also expressed that approximately 65 percent of the consumers who make purchases over mobile devices are first time users of the site. The majority of those new years are in younger demographics and reside in smaller cities and towns across India in which broadband internet service has not yet become the standard., said Bahl.

Many of the users who make purchases via mobile commerce also do not have credit cards. For this reason, they take advantage of the opportunity to be able to have their purchases shipped to them, at which time they pay through cash on delivery.