Tag: m-commerce

The Barclay brothers owned online shopping group has reported a before tax profits quadrupling.

A recent report that was released by Shop Direct, an online and mobile commerce group owned by the Barclay brothers, and has reported that its before tax profits have now increased by four times, to reach £40.4 million.

The company owns a number of different online shops and saw profits for the first time in 2013.

Among the brands owned by Shop Direct are Very.co.uk, and Littlewoods. Despite that it had been in existence for a decade, the first time that it had ever turned a profit was last year. It has also now reported having seen a sales growth of 3 percent – the equivalent to £1.7 billion, during the year that led up to June 30, 2014.

According to the company, mobile commerce played a very important role in its increasing profitability.

When looking at the figures presented by the company, it is not difficult to understand why it is crediting users of smartphones and tablets to its earnings successes. Its m-commerce took a very large portion of its sales, as a tremendous 44 percent of its transactions took place on some kind of mobile device.

According to the chief executive of the company, Alex Baldock, these are very powerful results and were greatly driven by the increase in sales that took place from mobile devices, especially when it came to the Very.co.uk brand. He explained that “These are strong results, driven by the outstanding growth of Very.co.uk and the unrelenting boom in m-commerce. Mobile continues to be a game changer for us.”

This growth of shopping over mobile commerce at its newer brands such as Isme and Very.co.uk, has managed to offset the declining sales that it has been experiencing at some of its older “heritage businesses”. Its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) came to £164.8 million after having risen by 24 percent. The group’s largest business is now Very.co.uk, and it boasts sales of over £700 million. This has made Shop Direct another solid example of the way that retailers can evolve in order to embrace shopping over mobile devices.

Whether retailers are ready or not, smartphone is going to have a considerable impact on consumers.

As is the case every year, holiday shoppers in 2014 will be looking to find the very best deals, and mobile commerce will be playing a very important part in that, regardless of whether or not the actual purchase is made over smartphones and tablets.

A growing number of pre-holiday survey results are starting to be released and they show that consumers want m-commerce.

One of the top consumer desires has been shown to be the ability to use their devices in order to price products and look for deals. Mobile commerce is more than simply making an online purchase through the use of a smartphone or tablet. According to a Google Consumer Surveys study that was conducted on behalf of Thinknear and that involved the participation of 1,000 adults in the United States, one in every three holiday shoppers plans to use a their devices to check prices.

Even before a shopper leaves his or her home to hit the stores, mobile commerce will play an important role.

The recent survey showed the following activities for which consumers expect to use their mobile devices during the upcoming holiday shopping season:

• Price comparisons (32 percent)
• Researching ideas for gifts (31 percent)
• Reading product reviews (27 percent)
• Looking for deals such as sales and coupons (25 percent)
• Creating a shopping list (22 percent)

These are very interesting statistics and reflect the type of behavior among consumers that retailers are going to want to take very seriously if they want to be able to get the most out of the holiday shopping season.

These results also reflect those that were revealed within the American Express Spending and Savings Tracker study that had been conducted by Ebiquity. Within that research, it was shown that the leading activities to be expected in online and mobile commerce during the holidays will be price comparisons, checking out ideas for gifts, and locating the best deals. These studies showed that these activities may be conducted before leaving to shop, or could occur while in store.