Alipay, the Alibaba smartphone payments arm, released a report to describe these digital shopping trends.
In China, the trend in mobile commerce has been a rapid growth this year, according to a report that was released by the smartphone based payments branch of Alibaba, Alipay.
The report detailed the way in which the less developed western region of China has driven mobile shopping.
The Alipay report showed that over half of the online transactions that occurred at Alibaba over the first ten months of the year occurred over mobile commerce. In fact, mobile phones were responsible for 54 percent of the online transactions using Alipay from January through the end of October. Comparatively, throughout all of last year, it had represented a much lower 22 percent of total online payments volume for purchases made online through the service.
The western, inland parts of China are easily the fastest growing areas being seen for mobile commerce.
The Tibet autonomous region, the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, and the province of Shaanxi were identified as the areas where mobile commerce was taking off most rapidly, at 62.2 percent, 58.3 percent, and 59.6 percent, respectively. Those areas are quite remote and lack a solid infrastructure of broadband internet service. Desktop and laptop computers are also still quite expensive there, making them less appealing than the far more affordable smartphone.
On the other hand, Guangdong province and the cities of Shanghai and Beijing, all well developed areas, saw growth of a much lower 27, 24, and 29 percent during that same period of time when it came to mobile shopping transactions.
According to expert in online shopping and the vice president of greater China for hybris AG (the enterprise software provider division of SAP AG software giant, based in Germany), Burghardt Groeber, who commented on this mobile commerce trend, “As mobile penetration in rural China far outpaces fixed-line Internet penetration and with continued upgrades to mobile network connectivity and the popularity of new devices, it is natural that consumers are rapidly taking up mobile shopping.” In China m-commerce is expected to reach $162 billion by the close of 2017.
The mobile commerce market shows so much promise that companies that had not been involved in commerce are beginning to show interest therein. Snapchat is one of the latest organizations to break into the mobile payments field. The company recently unveiled its new Snapcash service, which allows users of the Snapchat application to send money to one another. Apple also recently entered into the mobile payments space with its own platform, called Apple Pay.