Category: Tablet Commerce

Retailers in Australia struggle to master m-commerce

Even leading brands in the country are finding it difficult to provide consumers with the mobile experience they want.

Australia’s leader in retail m-commerce is a company called The Iconic, and while that particular brand may be doing well, as a whole, retailers from that country are facing quite a struggle in pleasing smartphone based shoppers.

This, according to the results of a new study that were released by Episerver.

The Episerver study looked into 20 of the Australia’s “bench mark” retailers and assigned them a score based on a range of different criteria. These various factors produced a final score that rated the companies on whether or not the m-commerce experience met the expectations of consumers. There were more than 100 smartphone and tablet users who participated in the survey that led to the final ratings in the study.

The m-commerce rating study, titled the “Episerver Mobile Commerce Report”, placed The Iconic in the top spot.

Australia Mobile CommerceThat company received a mobile commerce experience rating of 66.47 percent. It was able to demonstrate that it had implemented a successful strategy over tablets and smartphones, in addition to effective apps across both of the two largest platforms: iOS and Android. Still, regardless of the highest scores achieved by The Iconic, it was still clear that iPad users still believe the brand’s mobile app could use some assistance, as it received a score of only 49 percent from users of that device.

The brand that came in second was Kogan. That brand’s overall score was not much lower than The Iconic, at 64.96 percent. In third place was OzSale at 57.40 percent. Despite the fact that Catch of the Day was not among the top three, it was the app that received the best score in terms of the iPad app it offered. Equally, even though Kogan was in second place overall, it received the top rating for the mobile website (which scored 73.75 percent overall).

Among the other companies that did well in their overall m-commerce experience were Dan Murphy’s, Lorna Jane and JB Hi-Fi. Still, there were a large number of the overall 20 bench mark brands that did not do well at all. The average score across all 20 of the retailers – including the highest scores – was 34 percent. This was notably lower than the average of all other countries that were surveyed in this study.

Mobile security to be restored on Amazon’s Fire tablets

The marketplace and technology giant is bringing encryption back after considerable consumer upset.

Amazon.com has now announced that it will be returning its encryption mobile security feature to its Fire tablets following complaints and upset from privacy advocates and customers that accused the massive online marketplace of quietly slipping the security option off the devices with its latest operating system release.

A spokesperson for the company promised that the feature would be returned to the OS in the spring.

Robin Handaly, spokesperson for Amazon.com, explained that “We will return the option for full-disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring.” The decision to remove the encryption component of the Fire operating system’s mobile security fell into the spotlight quite suddenly this week. Amazon explained that the feature had been removed in one of its Fire OS versions that first started shipping in the fall of 2015 because there weren’t many customers who had used it in previous versions.

This mobile security feature scramble’s the device data so it is accessible only to someone who has entered a password.

Mobile Security RestoredThe encryption feature was built into previous versions of the Fire operating system and blocked access to the contents of the device to anyone who did not know the correct password. According to Bruce Schneier, a widely recognized cryptologist, Amazon’s choice to take down this encryption was “stupid.” Schneier was one of the large number of people and groups who were public about their criticism of Amazon’s removal of the encryption security and who publicly requested that the company bring it back.

Amazon isn’t the only one that has been caught up in struggles with regards to mobile device security. Apple has also been facing several legal battles with regards to whether or not they should be required to unlock iPhones involved in criminal cases, including the case involving Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.

This week, Amazon.com joined many other large tech companies when it added its signature to a court brief that was created to encourage a federal judge would take Apple’s side and not require that company to write code that would break through the mobile security of the iPhone used by Farook.