Nine years ago, mobile payments didn’t exist. By the end of 2015, mobile commerce was a $50 billion industry, already 7 percent of the total ecommerce market and growing quickly. By 2018, mobile commerce should grow to account for more than 50 percent of all ecommerce transactions. But mobile hasn’t just changed how we buy. It’s completely changed how consumers do their pre-purchase research and are influenced by both peers and other users. Today’s consumers are 24/7, connected, curious, and social. Transactions that used to have all kinds of barriers to clear are now as simple as a single click on Pinterest, or waving one’s phone over a retailer’s payment terminal.
How we got here is the story of technical and cultural convergence. It’s about the rise of social and rapidly evolving tools for marketing, advertising, and data analytics. It’s about brands finding better ways to engage us in moments of organic behavior — online, offline, and over disparate global networks, GPS, beacons, and WiFi. Mostly, it’s the story of how in nine short years, we have evolved into savvy, some might say insatiable, mobile natives. Pinterest’s Buyable Pins, powered by Braintree, seem simple on the surface. Users at home and on the go are engaged with content and products they’re interested in, so why not drop a button there beside the image of that designer shoes and give the consumer a chance to buy it on the spot? But the technical and business challenges that needed to be overcome to get to that point were massive — connecting, harmonizing, and actioning data from across screens, platforms, and networks, for starters. The effort has clearly been worth it. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are hot on Pinterest’s heels. By incorporating ‘Buy now’ type buttons in mobile web sites and apps, social platforms are leveraging digital wallet technology to help consumers decide what to buy within their trusted social experience, and making it easy to do so. This, in turn, leads to a lower cost of acquisition, more transactions, and higher lifetime value for web and mobile merchants.
Merchants monetizing in the mobile market will need to evolve at the speed of consumer demand to capitalize on the surging opportunity of mobile commerce. Big brands probably won’t have issues, but smaller merchants could struggle if they don’t have the correct tools or technical savvy to keep up. Mobile is not just an experience and revenue channel, it is THE means by which consumers will interact with brands, goods, services, and merchants going forward. Merchants that sort out easy, secure mobile payment methods and find a way to monetize user data by leveraging the opportunities of contextual commerce, location-based tech, and whatever comes next, will end up with a bigger piece of the growing mobile commerce pie.
Courtesy of VentureBeat
