Tag: mobile commerce news

Mobile commerce having an impact on online sales

IMRG, a retail industry association based in the United Kingdom, has released a new report concerning mobile commerce. The report shows that mobile shopping is becoming more common among consumers. This may be due to the fact that mobile commerce firms are beginning to take issues like security and efficiency more seriously. As mobile commerce platforms become more secure, consumers are becoming more likely to use these platforms. Efficient platforms also improve the shopping experience, further encouraging consumers to participate in mobile commerce in the future.

23% of online sales now come from mobile devices

The report shows that mobile commerce now accounts for 23% of online sales in the second quarter of 2013. This is an 11.6% increase over what mobile sales had been during the same period in the previous year. While sales are increasing, the report shows that mobile devices are primarily used to research products rather than purchase them outright. While this means that more consumers are using their mobile devices to enhance their shopping experience, it shows that many have yet to ease into the mobile commerce space.

Survey shows majority of smartphone owners have yet to make a mobile payment

A similar survey was recently released by market research firm Econsultancy that shows 51% of smartphone owners have not made a mobile payment with their device in the past six months. Many of these consumers have expressed interest in mobile commerce, but have chosen not to participate due to security concerns and other issues. Security is currently one of the most significant hurdles barring the aggressive progress of the mobile commerce sector.

Security proves to be a problematic issue for mobile commerce

As mobile commerce platforms become more secure, consumers are likely to show more interest in them. Mobile commerce has become popular for consumers and hackers alike, with the latter being drawn to the sector by the abundance of financial information that is readily available therein. Some platforms have been criticized for their lackluster security features, which have placed financial information at risk of theft and exploitation in the past, but this criticism has helped the mobile commerce sector become more aware of the threats that exist in the digital world.

Amazon, the leading retail sight among American consumers, has seen tremendous traffic increases.

According to a recent comScore analysis, the leading online retail store in the United States, Amazon, has increased its site’s visitor access by 42.9 million visitors exclusively over smartphones and tablets, over the month of June, alone.

This suggests that over one quarter of the shoppers at Amazon are shopping over these portable devices.

Among all of the 143.9 million people who made up the total digital audience at Amazon, a whopping 29 percent were mobile commerce only. When the visitors who visited the site from both desktops and either smartphones or tablets were taken into account, the total mobile audience was greater than that of the audience that used desktops exclusively.

It is important to note that Amazon isn’t even a leader in terms of the size of its mobile commerce audience.

The massive online retailer is not one of the largest mobile commerce only audiences in terms of their percentages (that is, as a percentage of their total audience). For example, Target had a mobile only audience of 37 percent, and Ticketmaster boasted 39 percent. Those were the second and first place companies, respectively. In third place was Best Buy, which had a mobile commerce only audience of 35 percent.

At the same time, other online retailers did not enjoy exactly this degree of boost from mobile commerce, however for all of the sites that were considered in the study, smartphones and tablets remained an important driver for what look to be incremental visits. This helps to better illustrate precisely how important the smartphone and tablet optimized shopping experience has already become.

It has been speculated that Amazon may have opened its Amazon Associates program to app developers in order to help to better capitalize on its mobile commerce strength. This will give developers the opportunity to advertise on their apps and link to actual Amazon products, earning themselves a cut of any sales that are made as a result. This could help to place the online retailer in direct and powerful competition with Google and Facebook.