The world of World Wide Web is moving faster than ever. A few years back, the eCommerce wave swiped away all other business models on the internet. Now that people are getting comfortable with eCommerce, M-commerce is here to storm it up again for businesses. And it’s the fastest shift ever!
According to Jmango 360, “More than one-quarter of the global population will use a smartphone in 2015. The mobile web adoption is growing 8 times faster than web adoption did in the 1990s and early 2000s. By the end of 2017, mobile commerce will account for 24.4% of overall E-Commerce revenues.” Shopify confirmed that 50.3% of the E-Commerce website traffic comes from mobile. Melissa O’Malley, director of global merchant for PayPal pointed out that mobile payment accounts for 20% of their total purchase worldwide, which was 1% back in 2010.
Truly, our lives seem to be confined within our mobile devices. We may forget to bring our wallet while leaving home, but we would never forget our smart phone. And why not! Mobile devices have made our life easier than ever. Now we can access any site anytime from anywhere, with just a few clicks on our handset. Now we don’t need to waste hours in store to store visits for product comparison or actual shopping. Now we have a Paypal research to back it up. PayPal conducted a research in collaboration with Ipsos to study m-commerce habits of 17,600 smart phone users in 22 countries. The study shows, “Between 2013 and 2016, the multi-country average compound annual growth rate for mobile commerce is projected to be 42 percent, toppling e-commerce’s same growth rate at 13 percent.” The Paypal research also shows that 33% of all online shoppers said that they are comfortable to use their smartphone to make a purchase while 64% of them confirmed that they use mobile apps to shop. The study also shows that the amount of total smartphone spending is expected to rise by $190 billion in the next 3 years. Here is a compelling graph by eMarketer, showing how mCommerce is taking over eCommerce.
Now that we have enough data to say that mCommerce is the future of online transactions, it’s your turn to make a move towards the revolution. Some businesses have already taken their first step towards it. Flipkart is one of the few pioneers in this shift. Last month, they declared that they would shut down their mobile website. And the mobile app would be the only mCommerece tool they would offer to their 26 million registered users. When asked during ad:tech conference 2015, Flipkart Ravi Vora explained how they slowly shut down their mobile site in three phases.
If you think that it was the boldest move by Flipkart, here comes a biggie. Flipkart owned Myntra declared that their desktop site will stop operation from May 1 onwards. If you’re into ecommerce, this is the time you must take mobile commerce seriously. And your biggest target audience woud be moms and millennials. A ComScore study shows that 81% of U.S. millennials own smartphone while 85% of them use digital media (including social media and email) on their mobile devices. On the other hand, moms in the US spend over 8 hours on mobile internet everyday. Millennials are the obvious choice but have you ever thought of moms as your primary target group? A lot of such information are in the pipeline to help you out with your mCommerce venture. Stay tuned!