Retail event will highlight the promising future of the mobile payments space
One of the retail industry’s major conventions is coming to New York and mobile payments may be one of the highlights of the event. The National Retail Federation will be hosting the event, as usual, and the organization suggests that mobile payments may be a significant focus of many companies attending the event. Retailers have become more interested in the mobile space over the past few years, largely due to growing smartphone penetration. In order to better engage consumers, these companies have become very supportive of mobile commerce.
Rewards program may encourage consumers to make use of new payment services
The mobile payments space is still quite young, but it is growing quickly. A growing number of retailers have begun to find that engaging mobile consumers with new payment services has been successful. In order to continue finding success, however, retailers will have to add value to their mobile offerings. Approximately 78% of consumers noted that they would make use of mobile payments services more often if they had access to some sort of rewards program through these services.
Security remains a major concern for consumers
Many consumers have shown favor for mobile payments because of the convenience that it represents. The problem, however, is security. Consumers have fears that their financial and personal information may be at risk if they were to use a mobile payment service. Retailers have been targeted in the past by those wishing to exploit consumer information, with some malicious groups focusing on mobile channels.
Retailers will have to take risks to find success in the mobile payments space
Retailers will have to find ways to ensure that consumer information is protected in order to find success in the mobile payments space. They will also have to find ways to add value to existing mobile payments services. Loyalty programs may be the best way to accomplish this, as consumers have shown great favor for these programs. The mobile payments space may thrive as a result of greater security and more valuable features being offered by retailers.
According to figures released by comScore, smartphones played a notably larger role in overall online shopping.
comScore has released its holiday shopping data and has revealed that m-commerce generated $12.7 billion in sales, while online shopping as a whole brought in a tremendous $69 billion.
These figures show that mobile commerce is growing fast but desktop shopping is growing slower than predicted.
This revealed that it really was m-commerce that was dominating the scene in terms of growth rate during the holiday season. This growth rate was considerably larger than that of PC based purchases. Moreover, it was also pointed out that regardless of whether or not a sale was made, the traffic that was seen on websites was greater on mobile devices than it was on desktops and laptops. Smartphone based shopping also rose rapidly from 2014 to 2015. In fact, comScore recorded the rate of growth during that span of time as being 59 percent.
This shows very rapid growth for m-commerce, though not as quick as what some had forecasted.
comScore recorded that the total e-commerce sales that occurred from November 1 through December 31, 2015 came to an estimated $69.08 billion. That research firm had previously predicted that the figure would have been closer to $70.01 billion during that span of time.
While mobile commerce did manage to exceed the forecast that comScore had put forward, desktop didn’t manage to do the same thing. Instead, it fell short of the predicted total by close to $2 billion. Once again, the largest single day for online shopping was on Cyber Monday, which fell on November 30, last year. On that one day, there were $2.3 billion in sales completed online.
That said, while there are a large number of analyses being released with regards to the totals in sales of e- and m-commerce, many analysts are saying that it is short-sighted to try to think of the sales as occurring either on one type of environment or another. Instead, many reports are starting to acknowledge that the line between online and offline sales, and the line between PC and mobile devices is quite blurred as consumers will often cross from one environment into another and, perhaps, back again before a final purchase is made.
