Tag: mcommerce

Mobile commerce sees 84 percent growth in Brazil

| August 6, 2014

Despite the success of smartphone based shopping in the country, there are still a number of hurdles to overcome.

According to a recent mobile commerce report that was published under the title “WebShoppers”, by the e-Bit consultancy firm, the number of people in Brazil who are using their smartphones for online shopping purposes has increased by 84.2 percent within the last 12 months.

In June of this year, m-commerce represented 7 percent of the total transactions occurring online.

When compared to the figure at the same time last year, which was only 3.8 percent, it is clear that mobile commerce is an area that is making rapid headway within the Brazilian marketplace. During that same period of time, the number of transactions that were actually carried out totaled 2.89 million. This brought in $497 million, said the report. Among the top performing segments over mobile shopping were fashion and accessories, as well as cosmetics and health products, and electronics.

The report believes that if the rate of growth continues this year, mobile commerce will represent 10 percent of online shopping.

Mobile Commerce Growth in BrazilFashion and accessories made up 18 percent of all of the m-commerce sales. This was followed by the cosmetics and health products category which brought in 16 percent of the sales over smartphones and tablets. Eleven percent went to the sales of electronics products. The report predicts that online outlets in Brazil will have served 63 million unique customers by the close of 2014.

Comparatively speaking, while the e-Bit prediction is that mcommerce will represent 10 percent of the total of online sales in Brazil, in the United States, that figure is expected to by 29 percent, according to Forrester Research.

Though the growth of mobile commerce is quite strong in Brazil, the report has identified a number of barriers that have stopped it from keeping up with certain other markets, such as the United States. This includes the low penetration of residential WiFi, as well as the issues with 3G coverage. The e-Bit report identified those struggles as the main problems standing in the way of the true success of the channel.

Mobile commerce website “rules” may not be necessary for success

| July 25, 2014

Barnes & Noble’s smartphone friendly site does everything wrong but has managed to get it right.

Even though Barnes & Noble has done virtually everything wrong when it comes to the typically accepted guidelines for ensuring success in mobile commerce, the smartphone friendly site still seems to be bringing in a comfortably high success rate.

The m-commerce website has a heavy page weight, it loads slowly, and it contains far too many page elements.

The mobile commerce site for the number 41 company in the Internet Retailer Mobile 500 essentially breaks all of the rules when it comes to the recommendations that have been made by Keynote, a highly respected firm in this area. And yet, despite its failing to use the best practices for its overall page construction and for its performance, it is doing quite well. According to Keynote’s Matthew Agnoli, “The Barnes & Noble mobile home page is more than twice as slow as any of the other top five sites, as well as more than double the amount of content and is much larger in size.”

Still, the site still ranked as number 5 on the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.

Mobile Commerce - RulesThis was for the week that ended on July 13. According to Agnoli, the one strong point of the m-commerce site that raised it above many others was that it held to a tremendous success rate, which was 99.35 percent. For that week, the average success rate for all of the sites on the index had been 97.96 percent, so clearly Barnes & Noble’s website performed notably better.

That said, success rate enough may not be adequate for the site to be able to hold its position among the top 5 on the list. If other sites manage to bring their own success rates higher, then Barnes & Noble could find its rank plummeting rather quickly. Agnoli pointed out that “A site needs to be both reliable and fast to ensure high customer satisfaction and to keep customers returning.”

Agnoli recommended that the Barnes & Noble mobile commerce site make a number of changes in order to improve the site’s performance and speed it up, to make it much more appealing to consumers.