If you keep following the recent development of mobile industry, you can find that it is experiencing a new wave of business growth. For instance, there were more than 70 million people in the US accessing the Internet from their mobile phones in 2009, more than $6.2 billion dollars will be spent in application stores in 2010, and over $ 429 million dollars will be spent on the mobile search ads in 2012, according to the Gartner’s survey Gartner Says Consumers Will Spend $6.2 Billion in Mobile Application Stores in 2010. All these reports indicate that everything in the mobile is going up but one is vague in its future. According to the eMarketer article M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy, mobile e-commerce is still struggling for blooming. The following statistics gave us an insight of what hindering M-commerce from expansion.
There are two major issues in pushing the m-commerce forward. For retailers, insufficient investment on m-commerce is the largest obstacle in creating a feasible, reliable, and user-friendly shopping environment. On the other hand, consumers have little confidence in making purchase with their mobile phones. They worry about the security and privacy in the purchasing process. These concerns drag the feet of both shoppers and retailers to embrace the age of m-commerce.
What are the issues slowing down the pace of retailers in putting money into the m-commerce development? This report M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy gave us one likely answer. The lack of standardization among smartphone browsers and operating systems impedes retailers’ resolution to move forward. “Mobile app developers need to carefully pick and choose where they think they can get the best return for their effort,” noted Mr. Grau.
We can find another interesting survey in this article M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy, which shows consumers are willing to buy on the air, even though mobile shopping environment is not ready for them. In this statistics, consumers are likely to buy items such as pizza, tickets, fast food, and coffee with their handsets. We can find that most items that appeal to on-the-go consumers cost small amounts of money. There may be three reasons resulting in this phenomenon.
First, the lack of confidence in security makes consumers intend to spend small amounts of money. If something going wrong, that wouldn’t be much loss. The second is the time spent on mobile shopping. For mobile users, they don’t have much time to search, compare, and purchase. Therefore, just duplicating today’s e-commerce experience on the Internet would not make things go right. To make people buy more expensive items, retailers need to make purchasing process simple and easy. One more important consideration is a well-integrated interface for users, which is user-friendly and helpful. Consumers need useful tools to help them efficiently finish the purchase process and fewer skills to use them. For example, a tool can easily compare product prices between retailers is wonderful.
A simple and secure mobile shopping experience is vital for users. Just like the article say, “But mobile phone users say they would make more purchases if the process were not so cumbersome, products were easier to find and their devices supported secure credit card transactions.”
Reference
Anonymous (2009, September 3). M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy. Retrieved on February 6, 2010 from http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007258&Ntt=billing+revolution&No=-1&xsrc=article_head_sitesearchx&N=0&Ntk=basic
Egham,U. (2010, January 18). Gartner Says Consumers Will Spend $6.2 Billion in Mobile Application Stores in 2010. Retrieved on January, 28, 2010 from http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1282413
