Tag: mobile commerce success

The company’s online transformation is now a year old and is proving to have been highly worthwhile.

Argos has announced that in the first half of its financial year, its mobile commerce has over doubled and is now representing 16 percent of its total online sales, only one year after having redesigned its entire digital existence.

Approximately 43 percent of all of its sales were made online, illustrating the growing importance of digital.

This figure includes the Check & Reserve service use, which experienced a 124 percent mobile commerce growth over smartphones and tablets, combined. This was led by a new app that was released for both of those devices. Overall, in the multichannel sales experienced by the company are now representing 52 percent of the total sales at Argos. During that period, it represented £899 million in sales.

At the same time, Homebase, an Argos sister company has also seen extensive mobile commerce growth.

Within the half year period, Homebase saw a growth in its own multichannel sales by 28 percent. Both of those companies are owned by Home Retail Group. Overall, that organization saw a rise in sales of 3 percent, reaching £2.6 billion within the 26 weeks that ended on August 31. This includes the figure contributed by mobile commerce.

At Argos, like-for-like sales increased by 2.3 percent, whereas at Homebase, those sales increased by 5.9 percent. That said, at the same time, there was a 70 decrease in pre-tax profits, which dropped to £14.2 million from having been £46.7 million during the same period in 2012. This is explained because last year the organization was able to benefit from a very large credit of £35 million. This year, it faced a cost of £12.6 million instead of a credit. This had to do with the expenses of its “restructuring actions” such as its digital transformation program.

At the same time, if all of those offline, online, and mobile commerce costs are not taken into account, then the benchmark pre-tax profits brought in £27.4 million, which is an increase of 53 percent over the £17.9 million that was seen last year.

Smartphone based purchases are representing a very large proportion of the overall figure.

The largest online marketplace in India, Snapdeal, has just released its mobile commerce data in that it has revealed that at the moment 30 percent of online purchases are originating from smartphones.

This trend has appeared to increase to a tremendous degree on the website, skyrocketing over last year’s figures.

When compared to the mobile commerce proportion of online purchases, last year, it looks as though the figure has grown by a tremendous 10 times. This is because at the same time last year, only 3 percent of the Snapdeal purchases were originating from smartphones.

The mobile commerce research was conducted by Snapdeal, itself, and provides insight into buying behaviors.

This mobile commerce study provided interesting and useful knowledge regarding the way that consumers behave, and the trends that are forming around them. The average number of visitors recorded by Snapdeal for its website was between 35 and 40 million per month. Among them, 12 million are from smartphones. From that 80 percent is organic, and 60 percent is new to the website. Among those shopping from their smartphones, 75 percent were COD, while the last quarter paid in advance.

This last data suggests that consumers may not be entirely comfortable making mobile commerce purchases online, and that they are taking precautions by paying on delivery instead of trying to pay in advance before they have received the product, in the vast majority of circumstances.

The majority of the mobile commerce visits to the sites originated from the cities of: Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi – listed in no particular order. The top selling categories over this channel on the Snapdeal website were clothing (both men’s and women’s), men’s footwear, flash drives, and memory cards.

This mobile commerce data, as a whole, suggests that the majority of smartphone users are shopping a great deal more over their devices and that this growth rate is an exceptionally rapid one considering the difference between the figures from last year and the statistics that have been recorded from this year.