Tag: india mobile commerce

Mobile commerce and payments partnership with ICICI and Movida

| July 25, 2013

The joint venture between Monitise and Visa has started a strategic deal with the Indian bank.

A new mobile commerce and smartphone payments partnership has now been announced between ICICI Bank from India, and the Visa and Monitise 50/50 joint venture in the country called Movida.

The largest private sector bank and the joint venture signed the agreement for smartphone friendly offerings.

Through this new partnership, ICICI bank intends to make new mobile commerce and payments offerings in a deal that has been compared to the one that occurred in 2012 between the same platform, Movida, and HDFC Bank, the second largest one in India’s private sector.

This will give ICICI’s customers the chance to take advantage of some of the potential of mobile commerce.

Mobile Commerce - ICICI Bank & Movida PartnershipSome of the mobile commerce offerings that the Movida platform will provide to ICICI customers include the ability to pay their bills, purchase movie tickets, and recharge their prepaid wireless accounts from their smartphones at any time, no matter where they are.

The Movida platform can be accessed through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology that is currently available in a number of different language (which is important considering the diversity in languages in India) or through the menu-based Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) GSM mobile protocol technology. The hope is that by providing these different mobile commerce options for access, it will help to maximize the number of consumers who will have the appropriate smartphone technology to use it.

ICICI Bank plans to roll out its new mobile commerce options later on in this quarter. It will be available to its payment card holders and will function across all of the different wireless networks through any payment credit card, including Visa, MasterCard, and a range of others.

In order to use the new mobile commerce feature, cardholders will need to link their card of choice to their smartphone number, which has been registered with ICICI Bank. They will then be able to make a payment through Movida’s secured connection. The card data is secured through the use of a unique, customer selected PIN which will be entered at each use.

M-commerce expected to warm up over the summer

| April 24, 2013

According to a recent study performed in the Indian market, there are hot products sold over mobile.

eBay India has released the results of their summertime m-commerce survey and has discovered that the channel will be exploding with shoppers over the hottest months of the year, and they know exactly what they want to buy.

The scorching heat appears to be adding some warmth to the smartphone shopping marketplace.

Within the m-commerce survey, eBay discovered that more than fifty percent of the population intends to make purchases over their smartphones or tablets, typically from the comfort of their own homes. They are choosing this alternative over having to leave their homes to deal with the sweltering heat this summer in order to head to the local mall.

Fifty nine percent of the m-commerce participants said they wanted to shop over smartphones and tablets.

The reason cited for this preference toward staying in and shopping over m-commerce instead of going in person to the mall was that they would be able to stay out of the heat and avoid the overcrowding in the market areas.M-commerce Summer

The survey also identified the top products that are expected to be purchased over the m-commerce channel. The research respondents said that they would be most likely to buy cotton apparel, shorts, t-shirts, caps, and sunglasses. Among the colors that are most likely to be purchased are green, blue, white, cream, and black.

According to the eBay India country manager, Muralikrishnan B., the adoption of m-commerce “has increased significantly in the country due to multiple factors such as enhanced 3G penetration and availability of affordable smartphones.” He added that this activity has become one of the preferred option for many Indians, particularly among those in the smaller cities.

This has become increasingly obvious as a recent m-commerce study that the company also performed has shown that 49 percent of the users of the online marketplace are from non-metropolitan cities. He added that because eBay is one of the pioneers into this channel within the country, they have considered it to be truly promising to watch the shift toward mobile in India.