Mobile Shopping: More Buzz Than Buy So Far

By Ellen Gibson

September 6, 2011 10:04AM




Consumers are finding it hard to shop on their phones, in part because they don't quite think it's safe to input credit card info. The most successful mobile shopping sites are eBay and Amazon, which have been able to smooth the checkout process by accepting PayPal or storing payment info in users' accounts. They've also made searching simpler.

IDC MarketScape.: Worldwide Business Consulting Services 2011 Vendor Analysis provides a comparison of the leading players in the business consulting services market. Get the ICT industry's premier vendor assessment tool, providing in-depth quantitative and qualitative technology market assessments of ICT vendors. Get your complimentary copy for IT purchasers and decision makers, now.

When it comes to mobile shopping, so far there's more buzz than buy. As the number of people who use iPhones and other smartphones grows, companies selling everything from hardware to high fashion are touting all the new applications they're rolling out that enable shoppers to do anything from check a store 's inventory while in the dressing room to order prescriptions.

Retailers are betting that selling their wares on a device that people carry around all day can encourage Americans to spend money during an economic downturn in which they're making fewer impulse buys in their bricks-and-mortar stores. But so far, consumers mostly are using their phones to look up locations and compare prices and stopping short of tapping the "buy" button. Why? In part because they find it hard to shop on the tiny screens and they don't quite think it's safe to input their credit card information into their phone.

To be sure, mobile purchases are growing faster than online sales, which are increasing at around 10 percent a year. But mobile commerce is expected to account for $6 billion, or just 2 percent of overall e-commerce sales this year, according to Forrester Research. By 2016, that figure could rise to $31 billion -- still a sliver of electronic sales.

"The transactions aren't anywhere close to a big number," says Siva Kumar, whose company, TheFind, offers mobile price-checking applications. "But the first stage of any revolution is that people start using the new tool."

The use of smartphones is indeed growing. There are 82 million smartphones in circulation today in the U.S. -- one in every three people 13 and older owns one -- and that figure is expected to double by 2015. And smartphone users are increasingly using mobile applications: The average user spends 81 minutes a day using mobile apps, more time than is spent Web browsing on a computer or other device, according to mobile analytics firm Flurry.

But smartphone users are spending most of their time playing games, checking social networks, taking video, accessing maps and getting sports scores, according to digital research firm comScore. Shopping, meanwhile, ranks at No. 13, with less than 7 percent of mobile users accessing online retail stores through their phones. (continued...)

http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=80027