As we ring in the New Year, the most promising trend to watch over is mobile commerce. With the explosion of mobile device carriers with internet access, mobile commerce has been steadily rising. Real time access to updates and sales through social media has allowed consumers to stay connected with their favorite brands more than before.
Mobile commerce grew to $3.4 billion in 2010, a 253% increase from 2008 and 143% increase from 2009. These are amazing numbers and are all due to the rise in smartphones and mobile retail applications.
To reinforce this mobile commerce trend, eBay recently reported a $100 million increase in mobile sales this holiday season between Nov. 25th and Dec. 25th. That’s a $143% increase from $42 million the same time last year. More people are mobile and buying from their fans. The most popular items that were purchased via mobile smartphones, included clothing and accessories, toys, cell phones, sports items, and auto parts.
Clearly, mobile commerce will continue to grow. The enormous increase to $3.4 billion a year should be a signal for retailers to enter the market. Although we may believe that many people carry smartphones, there are still a large portion of individuals who don’t. According to research done by Neilson Co, 31% of mobile phone carriers carried smartphones in Q3 2010, which is 19% increase from Q3 2009. About 69% carry conventional cell phones, which do not have advanced web browsing and application capability. The basic function many phones can do is texting. Americans love to text and a survey done by comSCORE found that 66.8% Americans text. The read rate for those opt-in text messages is 95%, according to Cardinalscore. Some retailers have found success by mass texting customers with sales, discounts, and coupon codes. Others have even provided customers to shop by texting item codes. In order to take advantage of the smartphone gap, companies should look into text advertising. It is much more cost efficient and able to reach a large demographic.
It will be interesting to see how far mobile commerce will go in 2011, especially as consumers continue to convert over to smartphones.How much more comfortable shoppers will be with mobile shopping remains to be seen. Much similar to the rise of e-commerce, it will take time for the transition to take place.
Written by Daniel T
