Brands are being advised to look to this channel in order to help to considerably increase their sales in that country.
According to a Draftfcb China global study, the adoption of mobile commerce by brands and companies could help them to double or even triple the sales that they are experiencing over the short and medium term future.
The research looked into the data collected by a study in which there were participants from 8 regions.
Participants in the survey lived within one of eight major global economies and were aged from 18 to 64 years old. It was conducted in the second half of 2012 and there were 8,000 respondents to the mobile commerce survey. The countries included the United States, the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, China, and the Middle East.
The results indicated that China was an extremely important player in the mobile commerce ecosystem.
The survey indicated that among the respondents from China 57 percent of smartphone owners would purchase any type of product using their devices. This was considerably higher than the global average, which was 49 percent. Chinese consumers have become a very important part of smartphone retail shopping, as they live in one of the economies in which the penetration of these devices is the greatest.
The study showed that China possesses the most active mobile commerce market. In fact, people in that country use their smartphones for more functions overall than in any other country or region represented in the survey. Overall, smartphone users from China were conducting 4.9 different types of activities on their devices every day. Comparatively, the United States was in second place at 4.7 percent, and India conducted 4.4 activities per day.
The research indicated that mobile commerce provides brands with access to most cities in China, even when their stores or products don’t actually have a physical location within them. It also stated that this helps to explain why some of the most common smartphone shoppers are individuals residing in the smaller cities and people in Generation Y, the most digital of all of the adult demographics.
For example, it was predicted that the sales would make up 11.5 percent of total British retail sales by the end of the year. This, compared with the 10.2 percent, which was the figure last year. eMarketer had predicted that among digital shoppers, 58.3 percent will browse or research the products that they are considering this year.