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Mobile commerce study reveals consumer payment preferences

Rebecca | June 26, 2013

The research revealed that 29 percent would rather pay with their smartphones than credit or cash.

A recent mobile commerce study has revealed that nearly one third of Americans have stated that if they could carry only a single item when they leave the house, it would be their smartphones, even over and above their wallets.

This preference has occurred at the same time that a growing interest has revealed itself in smartphone payments.

These discoveries were among the results of a mobile commerce analysis that was conducted by PayPal. It also indicated that most consumers in the United States – 86 percent – wish that they wouldn’t need to carry a wallet at all. The report on the study also looked into the consumer attitudes in four other countries, which were: Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. They saw a similar trend toward smartphone payments in each of those countries.

At the same time, the report indicated that businesses are falling behind consumer interest in mobile commerce.

Mobile commerce mobile payments What it showed was that businesses are not keeping up with what consumers want from mobile commerce and payments. It has indicated that 68 percent of Americans have found themselves in a situation in which they would want to buy something but they didn’t have any cash on them. Another 30 percent stated that this happens to them frequently. However, PayPal did not include any data about the attitudes regarding business owners for accepting smartphone payments within the report.

Another mobile commerce study performed by Gartner, showed that transactions will likely grow to reach $235.4 billion before the end of the year. Moreover, by 2017, they predict that transactions will hit $721 billion. At the same time, NFC technology – which has been used for many forms of mobile payments services – has not taken off as had previously been predicted, and many high profile services (such as ISIS and Google Wallet) have struggled to take off.

The PayPal mobile commerce survey indicated that shoppers are ready and looking for a change in the methods available to them for making payments, but there is yet to be a market winner because no single system has emerged.

Mobile commerce sites grow loyalty through social media

Julie Campbell | June 20, 2013

These smartphone friendly websites are using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and others to build relationships.

According to the latest research, mobile commerce websites are increasing their use of social media marketing because of the advantage it provides in generating a sense of a personal relationship between their customers and their brands.

The researchers in this study referred to the trend as “swift guanxi” due to its areas of effectiveness.

The term has been used because the “guanxi” concept is from China and is “broadly defined as a close and pervasive interpersonal relationship” as well as “based on high-quality social interactions and the reciprocal exchange of mutual benefits.” This, according to the researchers from the study, Robert M. Davison, Carol Xiaojuan Ou, and Paul A. Pavlou.

The researchers found that using mobile commerce in this way was highly effective for building loyalty.

When they spoke of swift guanxi, they were talking about the ability to ease interactivity, loyalty, and repeat transactions when using social media for mobile commerce purposes. The data used in this study was gleaned from the leading online marketplace in China, TaoBao. They looked into the way that computer mediated communication (CMC) technology could be used for this purpose and convert shoppers who would otherwise have made a single purchase and never return, into a long term customer by way of personal rapport.

It had previously been assumed that shoppers had a preference for impersonal transactions. However, this mobile commerce study shows that both consumers and retailers have an inherent liking for the type of relationship that can fall under the guanxi label, even though the degree of that interaction may vary from one culture to the next.

According to Pavlou, “Nobody would argue that personal relationships are unimportant, but it is unfathomable that people in the U.S. would engage in such extensive communications and personal interactions for a small transaction.” He was referring to the fact that in China, for instance, a very small transaction where only a few dollars were spent could be the result of a communication that could take well over three quarters of an hour.