Tag: mcommerce

Mcommerce sites in China see increases of 600 percent in 2012

| March 19, 2013

Mcommerce China Retail GrowthThe leading websites in the country saw tremendous growth over the mobile channel.

Recently released data from the leading e-commerce sites in China have revealed that those websites experienced an average mcommerce growth of 600 percent last year.

In that country, online shopping is generates an estimated $40,000 per second.

However, the majority of that spending has been over laptops and desktops. This is what has made it so notable that Tmall and Taobao have reported that the purchases that were being made on their websites by way of smartphones and tablets has skyrocketed by 600 percent. This represents a massive growth in the importance of mcommerce and tcommerce.

There have also been a number of other considerable mcommerce victories over the last year.

The company that operates both of the aforementioned stores, Alibaba, also revealed that the number of unique visitors that came to Taobao in 2012 over its mcommerce apps or through a browser broke the 300 million mark. The blog from that company explained that among those visitors from mobile devices, 57 million (19 percent) actually made a purchase over their smartphones.

Though this makes it appear as though shoppers have made a major move toward mcommerce, among all of the transactions completed on Taobao last year, mobile represented only 6.87 percent. This is an increase of only 1.77 percent over the year before.

It was previously revealed through the data produced by iResearch last year in the second quarter that Tmall and Taobao had already established themselves as mcommerce leaders in china. They stepped far above the competition by taking in an online shopping share of 75.6 percent of all purchases made on the internet through the use of any device. Though there are other strong online retailers in the country, there are a number that remain underrepresented over smartphone and tcommerce, such as Amazon China.

According to Alex Qiu, the general manager for the Alibaba mobile business unit, “The speed of mobile adoption has been much faster than we thought it would be.” As smartphone and tablet adoption continue to take off in China, it makes sense that the use of mcommerce will only continue to grow.

Mobile payments bar may have been raised by Microsoft

| March 18, 2013

Microsoft Mobile PaymentsInformation about a new system on the Windows Phone platform has just been released involving Zero-Effort.

Microsoft has just released a considerable amount of detail regarding its new system for mobile payments that could considerable improve the appeal of its Windows Phone platform, as it will give smartphone users the ability to make a purchase without any effort at all.

This will allow consumers to buy products or services without ever needing to make a move.

Many of the smartphone manufacturers and other internet giants are taking sizeable steps into the mobile payments ecosystem, such as the payWave from Visa on the Samsung Galaxy 4, and the new Google Wallet making its way through its pilot period in two American cities for several months.

While many of the big players are focusing on NFC technology for mobile payments, Microsoft has looked elsewhere.

Microsoft’s mobile payments strategy was an exploration of how a consumer could make a purchase without having to mess around with the handset at a point of sale. It has labeled the style a “Zero-Effort Payment” (ZEP).

Microsoft Research representative, Sefan Saroiu, one of the team members who was a part of the development of the ZEP mobile payments, explained that this system would give merchants the ability to provide their customers with a more personalized service. For instance, they would be able to provide frequent shopper discounts without the need for the customer to carry a membership or loyalty card.

This mobile payments system functions through the integration of Bluetooth technology, in combination with face recognition technology that is worked right into its gaming system, called Kinect. When a user who is signed up for the service enters a participating store, it is detected by the Bluetooth system. When a customer is ready to pay, the face recognition system identifies him or her.

The Bluetooth system is able to determine that the participating customer has actually entered a store, but it is the face recognition that takes it a step further by identifying the unique individual customer who is at the checkout counter. That said, while the face recognition technology is not accurate enough to provide a completely precise recognition, when combined with the Bluetooth technology, it is capable of narrowing down the individual’s potential identity very tightly.