Recent falls of technology giants remind us of the survival need to keep pace of the market trends
In recent years, mobile commerce has grown by 53 per cent annually, compared to a meager 10 per cent of desktop e-commerce. By 2020 Business Insider reported that the market for mobile commerce is estimated to account for 45 per cent of total e-commerce, an equivalent of US$284 billion in sales in the US alone.
At the same time, mobile commerce app has gotten increasingly affordable with the presence of various e-commerce mobile app builders, some of which require no programming language whatsoever. So if your e-commerce store has not had a native mobile app, you are lagging behind big time.
Here are some trends that will help you decide your marketing strategies in the next few years:
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1. Customer experience plays an increasingly vital role to sales
More and more customers are abandoning their shopping carts without any purchase. According to Statista, almost three out of four shoppers abandon their shopping carts on desktop sites. The prospect is even grimmer on mobile where checkout rates are 70 per cent lower than the desktop rate.
This is understandable given the absence of a smooth, rich and easy experience which is lacking in many e-commerce stores without mobile apps (or even worse, the websites are not mobile responsive). Shown by comScore, average US user spent about 55 per cent of their digital media time in mobile apps. Therefore, it is unsurprising that Follow Analytics reported 64 per cent of 45 mobile marketers surveyed across enterprise brands said that customer experience and loyalty are the most important factors in designing their mobile apps.
These factors would be almost impossible to be achieved without having native mobile apps for E-commerce stores.
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2. Increasing adoption of mobile wallet
With Apple and Samsung are pushing hard their mobile payments to consumers, early adopters are starting to use these methods as their favourite payment of choice. For Singapore marketers, Visa’s 2015 Consumer Payment Attitudes Survey showed that 58 per cent of Singapore consumers would prefer making in-store purchases with m-wallet.
More interestingly, according to Oliver Manahan, MasterCard’s VP of Advanced Payments, customers who use those hands-off MasterCard payment methods spend about 54 per cent more than those who use traditional means. So although there will be cost involved in upgrading the current payment system for stores, there are noticeable benefits to be reaped here.
3. Wearable data will be important
In 2015, 39.5 million US adults over 18 used wearable devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers – a rise of 57.7 per cent over 2014 according to eMarketer.
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With the rising popularity of wearables from Fitbit, Apple and Samsung, marketers are taking advantage of the information provided by these devices to customise shopping experience for their customers. The US$475 million acquisition of My Fitness Pal by Under Armour is just one of the many stories of how business is making shopping a lifestyle rather than merely a leisure activity. Ultimately, this makes mobile shopping a highly personalised and intimate experience which drives us back to the first point in this article.
In a nutshell, the landscape of mobile commerce has changed significantly in the past three years. It is now resulted from development of multiple technologies in the last few years. Recent falls of technology giants remind us of the survival need to keep pace, or even better ahead, of the market trends.
What are some other significant changes that you think will affect how stores will conduct their business?
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