Despite the fact that consumers in Canada want to use their smartphones to buy, it’s not meeting their expectations.
According to the 2015 Holiday Shopping Survey from Accenture, consumers in Canada are actually eager to embrace mobile commerce, but retailers aren’t providing them with the type of experience that meets their expectations.
This means that most Canadian shoppers who would use smartphones are turning to laptops instead.
Canadians aren’t happy with what retailers are offering them by way of mobile commerce, so they are having to fall back on more traditional channels such as laptops and brick and mortars stores throughout the holiday shopping season. This, despite the fact that many shoppers across the country have said that they would be interested in using their devices to buy throughout this most important shopping season of the year. Almost half of the consumers who said they enjoy shopping in-store claimed that they liked it enough to continue their purchasing right through Christmas, itself.
Even though smartphone penetration is high in Canada, only 2 percent of Canadians use mobile commerce for most shopping.
Canada is one of the countries with the highest amount of smartphone use. Still, only 2 percent of the shoppers in that nation will be using their mobile devices for the majority of their holiday purchasing this year. The mobile apps and smartphone optimized websites are not swaying consumers to use their favorite devices for buying.
Among the leading reasons that shoppers in the country are staying away from m-commerce are that they have security concerns (38 percent), they are frustrated with retailers that haven’t mobile optimized their sites (28 percent) and they simply find it too difficult to be able to locate the products they want on retailer sites and apps (18 percent).
According to the Accenture managing director of retail, Robin Sahota, “The way Canadians think about shopping for the holidays is changing, and retailers must offer a more enhanced mobile browsing and shopping experience to drive sales at the busiest time of year.” Sahota went on to say that consumer demand remains high during the 2015 holiday shopping season and over a third of customers intend to spend more this year than last year; it just won’t necessarily be done over mobile commerce.
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and Opera Media Works have released the results of their Q3 State of Mobile Advertising research in which they discovered that “In India, 75% mobile users have smartphones. Even in markets where the transition from feature phones to smartphones has been slower (Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines), about half of the mobile user base has moved to smartphones.”