Tag: mobile payments

OpinionLab sheds light on consumer feedback

OpinionLab, a leading provider of Voice of Customer feedback, has released its Holiday 2012 eCommerce Site Experience Findings study. The study focuses on shedding insight on the experiences that consumers had using mobile commerce and e-commerce platforms during their holiday shopping in 2012. Christmas has yet to arrive, so the study mostly accounts for the experiences consumers had during the Thanksgiving shopping weekend, which includes Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The study draws upon the information provided by more than 43,000 consumers.

Consumers favor tablets over smart phones

Mobile commerce had a strong showing during the holiday shopping season this year. Millions of consumers made use of their mobile devices in order to purchase the products that they wanted the most. According to OpinionLab, one theme dominated the feedback they received for the study: Most consumers favored their tablet device over their smart phones when shopping. The study notes that consumers using tablets were more satisfied with their shopping experience than those using smart phones.

Tablets are not ideal for commerce

Though consumers preferred their tablet devices, the study shows that tablets were most favored for shopping, not for actually purchasing products. The study indicates that more consumers used tablet devices to research products, price hunt, and browse online stores. Customer satisfaction begins to diminish when mobile transactions become involved, with consumers claiming that tablet devices are not well suited to take advantage of e-commerce platforms. Part of this may be due to the fact that e-commerce platforms are rarely optimized to be used on tablet devices.

2013 may be a great year for mobile commerce

Tablets are becoming more popular with consumers, presenting a promising opportunity for retailers and other businesses in terms of engagement. Tablets have already shown promising growth this holiday season and this momentum may well carry into next year. OpinionLab predicts that mobile commerce will have an even stronger performance in the 2013 holiday season than it did this year.

The latest addition to the company’s availability is in Spain, raising its number of E.U. countries to seven.

The increasingly popular mobile payments startup from Sweden, iZettle, has just announced that it is taking its first steps into Spain, which has boosted its availability in the European Union to include seven different countries.

The service provides small businesses with a way to receive credit card transactions over smartphones.

The company is already offering mobile payments options to small businesses in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. It has also brought Visa transactions to Finland, Norway, and Denmark as of November 2012. They were able to accomplish this goal following the settlement of an issue between the two companies that had been outstanding.

The mobile payments will be expanding to Spain with an eye on small and struggling businesses.

The expansion into Spain is meant to provide small business owners who “are hurting” with new mobile payments options, said an mcommerce news release by the company. At the moment, there is no subscription fee for the company’s services and there is no minimum monthly fee. Instead, it charges a flat 2.75 percent per transaction.

The service works for either Android or iOS devices, and the mobile payments are compatible with all of the major credit cards including Amex, Visa, and MasterCard. This places iZettle in direct competition with a number of other companies that are offering comparable services within the European small business marketplace.

For example, there is a German startup called Payleven that is providing mobile payments services for Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Another example is Elavon, which is also headquartered in Europe and has just recently expanded into Ireland as of October, after being active exclusively in the United Kingdom until then.

Among the most recent mobile payments companies to make its way into the European marketplace is a company from Holland called Adyen. It is similar to iZettle in that it functions on both iOS and Android, but it is designed for large retailers so that they can make a point of sale in any location that there is an employee, in order to reduce lineups at the checkout counters.