One of the most quickly growing areas of mobile technology is mobile shopping – where mobile services are used to make shoppers and retailers lives easier. The recent spate of mobile shopping releases seems to back this up, and today mobile commerce company Netsize has released survey results indicating that almost 95% of mobile professionals would use mobile shopping services.
What’s the story?
Netsize is a Gemalto company – while its parent company is one of the global leaders in digital security, Netsize works in mobile commerce and communications. It ran a survey on over 1,000 “mobile professionals”, in order to find what people who are familiar with mobile technology think about mobile shopping. The results were overwhelmingly positive:
- 94% of respondents said they would make payments for goods worth up to €25 using their mobiles
- 83% said they would pay for single items worth up to €50 (like tickets)
- 51% said they would pay for goods worth up to €100
- 60% said that being offered a choice of payment methods was important
You can get the full report here:
What we think?
In the last month we’ve seen a tremendous number of mobile shopping stories:
Mobile barcodes are being activated for consumers;
Applications help retailers turn their floor staff into walking check-out counters;
German mobile shopping service Barcoo launched in England;
Tesco allowed customers to pay for goods over mobile (on Nokia before iPhone, interestingly);
And there have been more. A picture is being painted of a consumer base that is ready and willing for mobile shopping, but hasn’t been provided the right tools for it yet. Another to keep in mind is that Netsize chose very mobile savvy respondents for its study. Amongst those who know how great mobile technology can be, the wish for mobile shopping is naturally very high: they’re an excellent fit. But the non-smartphone owning public are generally far less aware of mobile than the still relatively-small high tech crowd. iPhone and Android devices are changing things, but there’s a reason Tesco went with Nokia before it went with iPhone: it wanted to target as large a group of people as possible. And the vast majority of shoppers are still people with mid-range phones.
