Tag: mobile shopping trends

The holiday shopping season has allowed the channel to become a standard form of comparison and purchasing.

The rapidly growing m-commerce trends of browsing, comparing, and actually buying on smartphones and tablets aren’t just a little piece of the fringe, anymore, but are starting to officially become mainstream.

Holiday shoppers, this year, have shown that even when they don’t make purchases, they use their devices.

Many analysts have been looking directly toward the purchasing data to determine whether or not m-commerce trends have been pointing toward the mainstream. However, when that data is considered, while there has been massive year over year growth, it still represents only a sliver of the total online purchases and even less of the buying as a whole. When the definition of mobile shopping is broadened, it soon becomes clear that purchasing is only one of several behaviors for which shoppers use their smartphones and tablets.

These m-commerce trends are important to recognize as they are often deciding factors for online and in store purchases.

That said, even without taking the browsing, price comparisons, receipt of advertising and discount coupons, and other activities into account, there has still been a great deal of growth, so far, over the holiday shopping season when it comes to mobile commerce purchases. But it seems to be in those “process” activities on the way to actually buying that small screens truly shine. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that almost 40 percent of all of the online traffic on Black Friday and almost a third of all online traffic on Cyber Monday was from smartphones and tablets.

Even though this did not represent the purchases being made, it shows that people are using their smartphones and tablets to visit websites and to look at companies, products, and prices. Because the devices are always with their owners, they are automatically using them, first, to perform quick searches, to locate nearby businesses, to find out whether or not the item that they want is in stock, and to discover the best possible price.

Three years ago, only 4 percent of Cyber Monday’s online traffic came from mobile. This makes it clear that m-commerce trends are headed toward – if they have not already achieved – mainstream status.

Mobile commerce vendor raises $9.5 million in funding

Branding Brand, a leading mobile commerce vendor, has announced that it has raised over $9 million in Series B funding. The company has made a major impact in the mobile commerce space, enabling large brands, such as Costco, Sephora, and Redken to facilitate mobile payments. Branding Brand is responsible for the e-commerce and mobile commerce platforms of more than 200 of the world’s top retailers, a major accomplishment considering the competition that exists in the mobile commerce space.

Funding to help company expand and improve services

Backed by new funding, Branding Brand is expected to expand its mobile commerce services as well as introduce improvements to its already existing platform. The company is likely to continue its focus on the mobile space, helping retailers make their existing web presence more mobile friendly. Branding Brand utilizes proprietary technology to make conventional sites more accommodating to mobile devices, improving the shopping experience that smartphone and tablet users have on these sites, thereby promoting mobile commerce.

Branding Brand helps retailers engage consumers more dynamically

Branding Brand does not only make websites more mobile friendly, of course. The company also helps develop engagement initiatives for retailers. For Sephora, for instance, Branding Brand introduced a feature into the company’s website that allowed Facebook users to easily invite their contacts to registry lists. Other retailers have made use of the services that Branding Brand offers. Branding Brand currently sees more than $1 billion in transactions coming through its mobile commerce platform, an increase from the $60 million in transactions it had recorded in 2011.

Mobile commerce continues to grow in popularity among businesses

Like other companies in the mobile commerce sector, Branding Brand has benefitted from the growing popularity of mobile technology. Today, consumers are more integrated into their smartphones and tablets than they have ever been in the past. This has led to the emergence of new forms of commerce and new shopping trends. Retailers around the world have been feeling the pressure to engage these consumers on platforms they have become very comfortable with, hence the increased interest in mobile commerce among businesses.