Tag: amazon mobile commerce

Mobile payments device rumors from Amazon are fizzling out

Although it wasn’t very long ago since the tech speculation blogs couldn’t stop talking about the card reader, it may be gone.

Amazon, like Apple, Google, and other tech giants, is always a beloved topic for the technology rumor mill and, until recently, it was strongly believed that the online retailer was in the midst of developing certain devices above and beyond its Kindle tablets and e-readers, including a mobile payments gadget.

The speculations about that particular machine, however, have begun to fade, across the map.

Although it was difficult to read the Amazon headlines over the spring and summer and not find a new update of some form regarding a mobile payments card reader from the company, it seems that the attention has been turned away from that type of device and is now looking into a smart-watch, a smartphone, or even a video game console.

This suggests that there won’t be much more to say about that particular mobile payments device.

Amazon mobile paymentsDespite all of the hype, excitement, predictions, and claims backed by “official sources”, it looks as though any chance that these mobile payments card readers from Amazon will come to reality is all but gone. Even if that is something that Amazon may investigate in the future, it doesn’t look as though such an idea is anywhere but on the back burner, at the moment.

At the same time, Amazon is still reportedly planning to use an app and mobile payments to be able to sell physical products. The in-app purchasing strategy is well on its way and has gained the company a tremendous amount of attention over the last while not only from tech experts, but also from app developers.

According to a new report, the application programming interface (API) has been in the market for some time now, regarding the in-app purchasing at Amazon. At the moment, this gives consumers the opportunity to purchase digital content, such as expansion packs, in-game currency, and electronic versions of books and magazines.

As this technology has been greatly successful, purchasing and mobile payments within an in-app experience will soon be making its way to the physical products environment, as well.

Mobile commerce is driving massive visitor numbers to websites

Amazon, the leading retail sight among American consumers, has seen tremendous traffic increases.

According to a recent comScore analysis, the leading online retail store in the United States, Amazon, has increased its site’s visitor access by 42.9 million visitors exclusively over smartphones and tablets, over the month of June, alone.

This suggests that over one quarter of the shoppers at Amazon are shopping over these portable devices.

Among all of the 143.9 million people who made up the total digital audience at Amazon, a whopping 29 percent were mobile commerce only. When the visitors who visited the site from both desktops and either smartphones or tablets were taken into account, the total mobile audience was greater than that of the audience that used desktops exclusively.

It is important to note that Amazon isn’t even a leader in terms of the size of its mobile commerce audience.

Mobile Commerce and website trafficThe massive online retailer is not one of the largest mobile commerce only audiences in terms of their percentages (that is, as a percentage of their total audience). For example, Target had a mobile only audience of 37 percent, and Ticketmaster boasted 39 percent. Those were the second and first place companies, respectively. In third place was Best Buy, which had a mobile commerce only audience of 35 percent.

At the same time, other online retailers did not enjoy exactly this degree of boost from mobile commerce, however for all of the sites that were considered in the study, smartphones and tablets remained an important driver for what look to be incremental visits. This helps to better illustrate precisely how important the smartphone and tablet optimized shopping experience has already become.

It has been speculated that Amazon may have opened its Amazon Associates program to app developers in order to help to better capitalize on its mobile commerce strength. This will give developers the opportunity to advertise on their apps and link to actual Amazon products, earning themselves a cut of any sales that are made as a result. This could help to place the online retailer in direct and powerful competition with Google and Facebook.