Merry mobile Christmas: MCommerce takes off
— -- As shoppers hunt down bargains and gift ideas for the holidays, it will be hard for some to remember a time when they couldn't pull out their smartphone and hunt down a store location, compare a product's price, or scan customer reviews.
It's only been a short while since smartphones and tablets such as Apple's iPad arrived on the scene in a meaningful way, but already these devices are having a profound effect on how shoppers behave and how retailers communicate with them.
Mobile shopping only makes up a tiny fraction of retail sales, but it is accelerating at a brisk pace. Last year, about 3.8% of all ecommerce sales were made on mobile devices, according to John Squire, chief strategy officer at IBM Coremetrics.
At the moment, mobile has grown to a 9% share of all online sales, but that number could rise to about 15% to 16% of all ecommerce sales over the holiday season, Squire said. The growth is even more impressive when you think that online sales are also accelerating.
It's all about value
According to a Deloitte study, almost half of all consumers say they will shop for holiday gifts online — a double-digit increase from last year. This makes the Internet the No. 1 shopping destination, now tied with discount stores, for the first time since Deloitte added the channel to the annual study.
One of the main reasons is that consumers say they can find more competitive prices online, and increasingly these consumers realize smartphones and tablets are another tool they can use for this research.
Within the next five years, more than half of U.S. consumers will be actively using their mobile devices regularly for shopping, according to a recent study by L.E.K. Consulting.
This activity will drive m-commerce sales to about $31 billion by 2016, estimates Forrester Research. The figure represents a compounded annual growth rate of 39% from 2011 to 2016.
Couch commerce
To look only at sales receipts, however, misses the broader influence mobile is having on the retail industry.
Take Thanksgiving. Much has been made of retailers such as Toys 'R Us and Walmart Stores kicking off their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving evening. But many retail analysts expect the shopping will begin long before the doors open at Toys 'R Us at 9 p.m.
Last year, the busiest days for mobile shopping was Thanksgiving, and this year the volume is only expected to increase.
So all those complaints about the millions of Thanksgiving dinners being ruined by the early start of the Black Friday madness miss the point that many Americans are already doing their holiday shopping in a tryptophan-induced haze from the comfort of Grandma's couch.
"People aren't really waiting anymore," said Claudia Lombana, a shopping specialist at online payments service Paypal.
Better experiences
Another reason why m-commerce is accelerating is retailers are simply providing consumers with better experience. Most retailers have improved their mobile sites and some have developed applications to make it easier to shop.
There also has been a lot of attention paid to improving the way email displays on mobile phones, said Heather Blank, vice president of Strategic Services at Responsys. This includes increasing the font size of the emails to make them easier to read on smaller screens or making the call-to-action buttons bigger so they are easier to click, she said.
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