One should always be careful about assuming personal experience is reflective of general behaviour but it is likely that my MCommerce activity reflects general consumer trends among those with smartphones.
As discussed in the previous post, services dominate mobile sales. I use:
- recorded entertainment
- information, free and by subscription such as news sites
- gaming and games
- payments for tickets and services such as banking and road tolls
- social media
Mshopping is conducted on three platforms: applications, mobile-enabled websites and conventional websites. The latter poses problems for the Mshopper because they are not designed with shopping on a small screen and a different operating system.
Therefore apps are popular as they are tailored for smartphones and work equally well on tablets. The downside is that they are generally limited to a single vendor, therefore limiting consumer choice. App stores go some way to countering this but the web offers a far wider world of shopping.
Despite the emerging trend, challenges remain. The mobile devices market is still in flux with a plethora of brands producing a dizzying array of devices from notebooks to tablets to mobile phones.
The problem with consumers
When a market is in this state, consumers are more difficult to cater for and are less predictable. For instance, someone using a website on a 10-inch screen may be more inclined to buy physical goods which can be better seen on a larger device. Viewing on a small-screen smartphone displays less detail and therefore is likely to affect consumers' confidence.
Development of communications (4G) and payments infrastructure also needs significant advancement to speed up surfing. Improved security and insurance against online theft is also needed to breed greater consumer confidence.
Overcoming the functionality of conventional websites is a particular concern. Writing for Mashable in 2010, Bruce Zielke of online payment giant, Paypal, urged vendors to pay particular attention to the checkout experience.
MCommerce will not yield significant sales in the absence of Mshopping design features, he warned.
Zielke’s comments were primarily in reference to smartphone surfing where the relative complexity of negotiating conventional shopping sites leads to too many clicks and high levels of checkout abandonment.
"It’s critical that your mobile customer has the same level of convenience that they would have if they were shopping on their laptop," Zielke said.
Simple layouts, large buttons, and limited scrolling make for a better experience that will boost conversions. However the temptation to limit product descriptions in the name of simplicity should be avoided.
Digital marketing specialist, Marekerle Davis refers to recent mystery shopping investigations in the UK, which showed MCustomers were resistant to plain-looking sites that did not correspond to vendors’ regular online presence.
However, all this activity in respect of mobile-enabled sites may not be as urgent as one might think. Google chief Larry Page believes cross-screen functionality will support mobile commerce. His focus on developing Google Chrome has been to create a product which content is seamlessly shared across platforms. "Search on the desktop, and the result is right there on your smartphone,” he said on a company earnings call last October.
This means that products can be viewed, and images saved, on larger-screen devices allowing for a decision on purchase to be made at a later date on any device, including a phone. The company published research showing that 90% of consumers use more than one device to complete a transaction, while 67% use multiple screen for online shopping.
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