Tag: m-commerce

The holiday and Christmas shopping season left the company’s previous accomplishments in the dust.

Shop Direct has recently revealed that is was one of the many online retailers that experienced a massive mobile commerce success over the last holiday shopping season, as its Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com websites saw considerable surges in searches and purchases from smartphones and tablets.

This is being seen as further evidence that British shoppers are accepting mcommerce on a growing basis.

The trading update from Shop Direct said that its mobile commerce sales saw an increase by 64 percent over the six weeks that led up to December 27. Chief executive of the company, Alex Baldock, said that sales over smartphones and tablets had “exploded” in the weeks and days that led up to Christmas.

Overall, mobile commerce makes up 43 percent of the total online sales at Shop Direct’s sites.

Baldock also added that “By 2015, we expect every transaction to involve a mobile device at some point in the customer journey.” He stated that it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this online shopping trend, and “we mean to stay on top of it.”

Shop Direct is a company that is owned by Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. They are also the owners of the massive Telegraph Media Group. They have revealed that they will be making a tremendous investment of £100 million toward the mobile development and digital business. A prime focus within this effort will be on personalizing their site, email marketing and digital applications.

During that same six week period, the company reported that their overall sales increased by 5 percent. This is an acceleration in its growth when compared to what it had been experiencing over the entire second half of the year, which was at 1percent.

There were a number of contributing factors to this growth, including the performance over mobile commerce, as well as the newer brands of the company, isme.com and Very.co.uk, which experienced a considerable sales increase of 27 percent. One interesting point was that in the weeks before Christmas, the company was selling one onesie every 35 seconds.

Mobile spending grows, but retailers miss out on a significant opportunity

The 2013 holiday shopping season has proven to be quite successful for most retailers and brands. A recent report from comScore show that online spending passed $46 billion during the holiday season while another report from the National Retail Federation notes that overall spending reached $601 billion. Mobile spending has grown significantly in 2013, but Jumio, a market research firm, has released a new report that suggests that mobile commerce has missed a major opportunity.

Mobile commerce misses out on $16 billion

According to the report from Jumio, mobile commerce missed out on $16 billion over the 2013 holiday season. Overall, the report shows that mobile spending has grown, but many consumers have reported a lackluster experience with their shopping experience. Mobile shopping platforms from retailers were launched late last year in order to attract the mobile audience, but these platforms were hastily developed and some were crippled by glitches that prevented people from purchasing products.

Abandoned carts may be the culprit behind the loss of revenue

The problem may lie with abandoned shopping carts. Carts are quite common in e-commerce and they serve as a place where products are stored before the checkout process has been finalized. Jumio suggests that consumers running into significant problems on mobile commerce platforms often caused them to abandon their online shopping carts. In many cases, platforms failed to store product information properly, causing consumers to abandon their digital shopping carts and start the process from the beginning.

Poor shopping experience cause consumers to drop mobile commerce

The report shows that some 51% of consumers opted to abandon their digital shopping carts because of security reasons. These people did not believe that a mobile commerce platform would be capable of keeping their financial information safe.  Some 47% abandoned carts because of difficulties regarding mobile payments, while 41% claimed that a mobile commerce platform they were using was simply too difficult to manage. Another 23% of consumers reported that their transactions would not go through during the checkout process, causing them to seek out more convenient forms of shopping.