Category: Featured News

A new Adobe Digital Insights report showed that smartphones played a considerable role in online shopping.

Mobile commerce sales came to just over $24 billion throughout the holiday shopping season this year. In fact, Adobe Digital Insights data showed that smartphones and tablets brought in that amount from November 1 through December 24.

That doesn’t include online purchases made over mobile devices at the last moment before Christmas.

Among all the mobile commerce sales this holiday season, smartphones were behind the vast majority. In fact, 68 percent of m-commerce purchases came from smartphones. Tablets were responsible for the remaining 32 percent. This represents a shift in usage as it looks as though people are now leaning toward their phones when they previously preferred the larger screened mobile devices.

Retail mobile commerce sales from smartphones brought in $16.63 billion, with $7.92 billion from tablets.

During the holiday shopping period, mobile devices were used for 31 percent of online retail sales, said the Adobe Digital Insights data. The remaining 69 percent of online purchases from retailers was through laptops and desktops. Last year, mobile shoppers represented 28 percent of purchases and in 2014, they made 19 percent of the purchases.

Adobe Digital Insights analysts predict that m-commerce will continue to take on a rising share of online sales. In fact, they stated that it is likely that this trend would have kicked in as early as the winding down of the holiday season. The reason is that from December 21 onward, many people were attending holiday functions and were more likely to have a smartphone in hand than to be seated at a work computer.

The report pointed out that the current mobile shopping experience still involves a certain degree of friction. This is primarily the result of the increased challenges involved in filling in purchase forms online. That said, it also underscored the fact that a growing number of retailers are working on improving that experience.

Retail mobile commerce sales could greatly benefit from the reduction of that friction. Some retailers are looking into options such as payment card information capture through the device camera, for example.

The largest mobile wallet in India has been delisted for iPhone and iPad due to technical problems.

At a time when mobile payments have taken off explosively in India, the Paytm app has been delisted for iPhone and iPad users. The Apple App Store no longer offers the mobile wallet after Paytm found technical issues such as bugs. The company worked hard to produce an update to iron out the problems and was awaiting Apple’s approval at the time of the writing of this article.

The temporary removal of the mobile payments application occurred on the heels of a service outage.

The Paytm app had been experiencing issues. The entire service was behaving oddly last week and for a stretch before then. It suffered a serious outage and then triggered a range of issues for days following, even after the mobile wallet was taken down from the App Store. That said, many people were quite surprised when the application was entirely delisted.

The reason is that while all updates for iPhone and iPad apps require Apple’s approval, the older version of the application will typically remain available for download until the updates receive the nod. In this case, the updates were awaiting approval and the entire app was taken down.

The reason for the Paytm app removal was not because Apple decided to intervene and delist it.

Instead, it was the choice of Paytm to take its mobile wallet down. According to a spokesperson from the company, “We have currently removed the app from the App Store to stop adding incremental new users to our existing base.”

The company then expanded on the statement by making a blog post that read “Today we found a bug in our iOS App where certain app users were not able to pay thereby hanging their app. Soon the system logged them out preventing them from further accessing their account.”

Currently, Paytm has more than 170 million registered users. The version of the app that runs on Android and the web-based platform are working without any problems at all, says the company. It continues to be available to download at Google Play and for browser users.

This may be good news for Android device users as the Paytm app and other mobile wallets have become a necessity for millions of people for the last couple of months. Ever since India decided to take some of its larger currency notes out of circulation – which are now being replaced with new versions – there has been a shortage of cash and consumers have needed to look to other methods of paying for products and services.