Tag: mobile commerce

Retailer becomes more than mobile payments and e-commerce

Acclaimed online retailer eBay has established a formidable presence in the mobile commerce sector. The company has been one of the strongest supporters of mobile payments and has made extraordinary efforts to encourage consumers to use their mobile devices to shop online and purchase products. As eBay continues to assimilate mobile payments, the company is beginning to consider itself as something more than a simple retailer: eBay is beginning to envision itself as commerce itself.

Executive suggests that eBay represents commerce itself

The company’s Europe vice president of marketing, Alexander von Schirmeister, recently spoke about the company’s role in the retail sector. According to Schirmeister, eBay has begun to trannscend the boundaries of e-commerce, partly due to the company’s strong focus on the mobile space. Mobile payments have helped eBay break into new markets and engage a new generation of consumers in a more dynamic fashion. According to Schirmeister, eBay “is not m-commerce or e-commerce, it’s commerce period.”

Fluid nature of company makes it accommodating to the needs of consumers

Schirmeister notes that eBay has become capable of adapting to the different ways that people shop and pay for products so effectively that they can no longer be considered a company with a specific focus in terms of commerce. In the past, eBay had only been capable of accommodating the needs of online shoppers that used traditional desktop computers. As mobile technology grew more prominent, however, the company began seeing a transition in the world of commerce and adjusted itself accordingly. This has allowed eBay to put more focus on mobile payments, which are quickly becoming more popular around the world.

Mobile payments can help close the gap between online and offline worlds

Because eBay has begun to see its role in the retail sector evolve, it has been making moves to close the gap between the online and offline worlds. Mobile payments are expected to help significantly in this endeavor, as they allow the retailer to engage mobile consumers in the physical world without severing their ties to the Internet.

The retailer expects that its mobile sales will increase beyond 50 percent with its new iPad app.

The flash sale, members only online retailer, Jackthreads, has already been reporting considerable successes over the mobile channel in terms of its sales, and is now sending its expectations sky high as it focuses on tablet commerce through its new iPad app.

The company already boast 4 million members, made up primarily of younger men.

Those customers have eagerly downloaded the smartphone apps for iPhone and Android over 2 million times, says the company. Now, it has expanded its application offerings by creating a tablet commerce app available for iPad users who would prefer to shop for products using a larger screen than smartphones.

The tablet commerce app complements the smartphone applications and the mobile website.

Currently, the company is reporting that 40 percent of its sales are generated through the use of smartphones through its app and m-commerce website. It now believes that its tablet commerce experience – through the launch of the iPad app – will be tremendously popular and will drive the mobile figure up to a full 50 percent or more.

Using the tablet commerce application will allow the company’s members to be able to swipe and browse through approximately 1,000 different brands and themed shops. The design of the iPad app picks up from the original layout that the company has been using for smartphones, and goes from there.

Jackthreads does have reason to have such high expectations for its tablet commerce experience through the new app. At the moment, approximately 5 percent of the total traffic to the company’s standard website comes from iPad devices. Moreover, those shoppers have conversion rates that are three times better than other types of mobile device. Their average orders are also 40 percent greater than other mobile device shoppers.

If the iPad tablet commerce app is truly capable of driving the mobile sales share over the 50 percent mark, this will be the first time that it has occurred in the history of the company, according to the co-founder and CEO of the Thrillist Media Group (operator of Jackthreads), Ben Lerer.