Tag: tablet commerce

Mobile commerce sales in the U.S. to grow by 74 percent this year

| August 27, 2014

Research released by Internet Retailer has shown that smartphone based shopping is rapidly gaining popularity.

It is no mystery that making sure that a store has an online presence – especially one in which products can be researched (or, even better, purchased) – is an important element in improving a retailer’s successes, but recent research is also showing that mobile commerce needs to play a bigger role in this effort, as consumers are looking to their smartphones and tablets on an increasing basis when it comes to finding the products and services that they want to buy.

A recent study involving the data from 366 American retailers has shown that m-commerce sales will be up 74 percent.

The study was conducted by Internet Retailer, which looked at U.S. retailers and their mobile commerce strategies. This was published in the 2015 Mobile 500. What it determined was that this year’s sales over smartphones and tablets would reach $59 billion, which is an increase of 74 percent over the $34 billion in sales that was achieved last year. Moreover, it also predicts that sales over smartphones and tablets will make up 23 percent of the online sales total for this year in the United States.

This shows that the pace of mobile commerce is growing faster than that of online shopping, overall.

U.S. Mobile Commerce on the riseIn the second quarter of this year, the online retail sales – including purchases made over desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices – rose by 15.7 percent, said the Commerce Department. While this is certainly a solid rate of growth, it is also very clear that it is much lower than the increases being seen in m-commerce sales.

The two companies that achieved the highest mobile sales so far in 2014, with a combined $30.8 billion, are Amazon.com (in first place) and Apple (in second place). Those two companies, alone, hold a 47 percent share of the Mobile 500 smartphone and tablet based sales total.

That said, the report also acknowledged that mobile commerce as a market is nowhere near mature and there is still a great deal of room for growth among existing players as well as among new entrants.

Mobile ads may not be all they’re cracked up to be

| July 16, 2014

As much as the smartphone marketing sector is taking off, one study is showing it may be more noise than action.

S4M, a mobile ads firm, has just released the findings of a recent study that it conducted based on an analysis of smartphone advertising campaigns, which has shown that nearly half of all of the ad clicks are not actually reaching the planned destination.

The research involved an analysis of over 1 billion ad impression from American, European and Asian campaigns.

These were all mobile ad campaigns that ran during May 2014. What S4M determined was that among the clicks that were achieved, as few as 50 percent actually managed to reach their intended destination during that month. The news was slightly better when it came to tablets, as the clicks that were made over those devices failed to reach their destinations 35 percent of the time. That said, as high as that figure might sound, it was considerably better than was achieved over smartphones.

This lack of proper performance by mobile ads is understandably far lower than acceptable for most marketers.

mobile ads - lack of actionThe S4M CEO and founder, Christophe Collet, stated that this research reveals that “there is room for significant improvement in the deeper understanding of where the best campaign value lies.” The company also came up with three primary reasons that they believe that this poor performance is occurring in advertisements over these devices.

The first was in being able to create ads on a very limited screen size, which can lead to “fat finger syndrome”, in which the user merely clicks the ad in error, when the intention was to touch something else on the screen. The second was slow network speeds, which can lead to a dramatic increase in abandonment. And finally, automated bot clicks in fraud scams that will register that the click actually occurred, but not the actual arrival of a visitor.

Collet pointed out that when it comes to mobile ads, “Spending budget on clicks that never arrive is budget wasted.” He explained that each point in the journey of the consumer must be measured and analyzed in order to generate a much clearer picture of the performance of a given campaign, in order to “enable real optimization”.