In the United Kingdom, the average 2013 spent over mobile commerce was £199.
Different mcommerce trends have become quite commonplace in the United Kingdom with four out of every ten smartphone owners having made a direct purchase through their smartphones and one in six have said that they have taken part in showrooming.
Among shoppers in the United Kingdom, 55 percent have used their mobile devices in store.
While in store, mcommerce activity often consisted of price comparisons, online. This was the case among 54 percent of the people who used their mobile devices while in brick and mortar shops. Another 41 percent had taken pictures so that they would be able to view them in the future. Forty six percent would research the items that they were seeing live in the store. One in every six were “showrooming”, which involves checking out an item in a store in person, but then using the smartphone or tablet to find a better price for it online and purchase it there, instead.
This mcommerce data was based on a survey of 1,000 owners of smartphones in the United Kingdom.
The research was published in a report called “’Agile Consumer 2013”. It was conducted by Cheil Worldwide. It also determined that half of all users of smartphones and tablets had shopping in mind when they purchased their mobile devices.
According to Simon Hathaway, the president of shopper marketing and retail operations at Cheil Worldwide, “The smartphone has become a key element of how we shop, and all evidence points to it having been a bumper post-Christmas sales period for m-commerce.” He added that there has been a near doubling in the amount of time that is spent purchasing products and services over smartphones over the last five years.
Hathaway also stated that even when the phone is not being used for direct mcommerce purchases, it is still a part of the buying process as consumers use it to compare, research, and seek the opinions of others. This, he said, is changing the retail experience entirely “as we become smartphone-focused shoppers – or what we’re calling ‘Agile Consumers’.”
This is a reflection of the increasing penetration of smartphones in the country, which is now at 60 percent.
As smartphone penetration in France is now estimated to have reached 60 percent, a rapidly growing number of people in the country are turning to mobile commerce as a part of their regular shopping activities.
This, according to a recent report from comScore, which indicated that since Q1, there are now 700,000 more smartphones.
With such as growing population of people who now have smartphones, it means that there is also a growing number of consumers who have the technology that they require to take part in mobile commerce. According to the comScore data, that is exactly what a tremendous number of French customers feel, as well. Merchants are reaching out to consumers over that channel, and those shoppers are often listening.
There are now 10 million consumers in France that use mobile commerce while in-store.
The comScore data indicated that while inside a retail store, many consumers are taking out their smartphones and are using mobile commerce behaviors to help them to make their decisions. For example, approximately 8.5 million people would phone or text a friend or family member in order to ask questions regarding a product that they are considering. Another 9.3 million people took pictures of items that they were thinking about and among them, 5.8 million sent them to family or friends.
Another 3.4 million consumers used barcodes to help them with their mobile commerce investigations, by using their devices to scan QR codes, for example, to learn more about a product or a brand.
It has been predicted that as the adoption of smartphones continues to expand, it could also reach the point that adoption of mobile commerce will move beyond that which is seen in other countries, such as the United States. This is because the daily routine of the average person in France includes a larger amount of shopping (such as for groceries) than the average American. Since the average person in the U.S. stocks up on food products only once every three weeks, there is a much lower opportunity for regular smartphone based shopping than in France, where the storage space isn’t available and groceries are purchased much more frequently.
