Tag: mobile commerce trends

Mobile commerce startup breaks the mold

A new mobile commerce startup called Boxed aims to make wholesale goods more easily obtainable for consumers. Typically, people have to go to large, membership-based department stores in order to purchase bulk goods at low prices, but these stores do not exist on every corner. Consumers can typically find a wide variety wholesale goods online, but the costs associated with shipping these goods mitigates any savings they could see. Boxed intends to change this by offering consumers with a way to purchase and receive wholesale products at a low cost.

Boxed provides free shipping to orders over $75

Boxed officially launched this week and is currently restricted to the eastern half of the U.S. Using the application, consumers can purchase a wide variety of products and have these products shipped directly to their home. Orders exceeding $75 will receive free, two-day shipping. The concept behind Boxed is to provide consumers with all the convenience of a wholesale department store without the auxiliary expenses associated with such stores.

Company holds its own inventory

Boxed is not just a mobile commerce platform. Behind the application, the company boasts of its own warehouse that stores approximately 500 unique products at any given time. This is somewhat different from the trend that has emerged in the mobile commerce scene. Companies like eBay and Google have been partnering with retailers in order to provide expedited shipping of products without actually having to keep their own inventories. Boxed, however, believes that holding its own inventory and fulfilling shipments is a better way to provide consumers with the services they are interested in.

Mobile commerce continues to evolve

Many trends have begun to emerge in the mobile commerce sector, but mobile commerce cannot be defined by any of these trends on their own. The constant evolution of the mobile space has provided mobile commerce with a lot of room to grow and companies like Boxed have been able to exploit this to their advantage. Boxed aims to offer a new service to consumers that may appeal to people’s interest in convenience and efficiency.

The results of a new survey have just been released and have shown that people don’t necessarily go out to buy.

PriceGrabber has just released the results of a mobile commerce survey that they conducted on the topic of back to school and which has provided some insight into consumer behaviors for making that type of purchase.

The research examined everything from where parents look for deals and what experience they enjoy most.

For example, the Pricegrabber survey indicated that mobile commerce is playing a very important role in back to school shopping this year. Sixty seven percent of the shoppers who took part in the survey indicated that they checked prices online before heading out to buy. Moreover, another 47 percent receive discount coupons over their smartphones via text message. Another 47 percent read emails containing discount offers while they are in-store.

Forty two percent of the survey participants use mobile commerce to make a purchase.

As fascinating and helpful as that mobile commerce data may be, there was one element of the survey that drew a larger amount of attention. There were 1,937 American shoppers who took part in this research by giving their opinions and sharing details regarding their shopping behaviors. What was interesting is that many of the smartphones and tablets were used from home either to make the purchase, or to research before heading out in the first place.

There is a large concern being expressed by owners of brick and mortar stores. This was that 46 percent of consumers with smartphones will use those shops as a “showroom”, so that they can see the product in real life, but then use mobile commerce to try to find a better price for the same product, somewhere else. This means that while they may window shop in store, they are actually buying while they’re online.

That said, the survey has indicated that those stores don’t need to worry about this threat from mobile commerce, as only 17 percent are actually using the devices while in store. This means that only a fraction of them are actually practicing showrooming and, among them, there is likely only to be an insignificant few who will find the product with a price and shipping total that will be low enough to make it worthwhile to wait to have it delivered instead of picking it up while they’re already there.