2% of consumers with web-connected mobile
devices are buying goods via mobile
But total annual spending via mobile remains less than the average spend via
PC.
Katie Deatsch
Associate Editor
Topics: Adobe Scene7, BlackBerry, iPhone, m-commerce,mobile app, mobile commerce, mobile
features, mobile shopping, mobile shopping statistics, mobile site design,mobile statistics
Mobile commerce may be maturing at a quicker rate than many experts have predicted, according to a report
today from Adobe Scene7. 62% of consumers with web-connected mobile devices have purchased merchandise
in a wide range of product categories using their mobile devices, the survey of 1,200 U.S. adult consumers who
own these devices finds. Adobe notes in its report that the respondents' mobile commerce adoption rate is
significantly higher than current estimates for the overall population because respondents to this survey all own
devices such as smartphones that connect to the web.
While more consumers are becoming comfortable shopping via mobile device, the Adobe Scene7 report finds
they still don’t spend close to the amount they do via PC. The greatest segment of mobile shoppers, 45%, spent
$249 or less via mobile during the last 12 months, the report says. By comparison, the average annual online
spend per shopper in 2010 was $1,139, according to an estimate from research firm eMarketer.
Still, 62% is a strong sign for the future of mobile commerce, even among a group skewed toward smartphone
owners. Mobile revenues are poised for big growth, many experts predict. U.S. mobile commerce sales are
expected to hit $5.3 billion in 2011, up 83% from a year ago, according to Barclays Capital.
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Users of iPhones, men and adults age 30-49 purchase more frequently, buy goods in more categories and
generally spend more time shopping than their peers, the report also finds. Users of iPhones overall also spend
more—66% report spending $250 or more on mobile purchases in the last 12 months. BlackBerry users rank
second with 58% spending $250 or more.
Movies, music and games, according to Adobe, are the most popular buys, purchased by 43% of mobile
shoppers. That was trailed by clothing, shoes and jewelry at 30%; electronics at 28%; and books, magazines and
newspapers at 26%.
“Shoppers are reaching for their mobile devices to research products and prices at the point of decision,” the
report, “Mobile Shopper Insights for 2011,” notes. “Curious consumers are scanning QR codes on outdoor
advertising and in magazine pages to get more information about a brand or product. As the impulse strikes them,
many shoppers are simply moved to purchase directly from their devices.”
The report finds most mobile shoppers are content with their experience. 80% rate their mobile shopping
experience above average. And shoppers are about equally happy with m-commerce sites versus mobile apps.
However, for some shopping activities such as researching products and comparing prices, a majority of
respondents favor using mobile sites over apps. Two-thirds of the respondents say they prefer sites to apps for
accessing product and other shopping content.
So what mobile shopping features do consumers most appreciate? Easy checkout , named by 57% of shoppers,
is deemed a top feature, followed by product and pricing information at 53%. Visual information, such as fullscreen product view, ranks third with 42%, followed closely by simple keyword search at 40%.
For visual tools, 54% say 360-degree spin is the aid that has potential to prompt them to buy. Side-by-side
product comparisons (49%) and interactive zoom and pan (44%) follow. Respondents rank these features ahead
of simple keyword search and customer ratings and reviews.
Full-screen image zoom with “next/previous” touchscreen buttons to navigate forward and backward ties with fullscreen horizontal scrolling with dragging or flicking images left and right as the top preferred ways to scan pages
or screens. Both of these viewing experiences were selected by nearly half of the respondents.
Women are more discriminating than men when it comes to mobile shopping. For example, easy checkout was
rated important by 61% of women compared with 51% of men, and 44% of women say search is important
compared with 36% of men. Women also place more importance on advanced visual features than men. They,
more so than men, deem color-swatching and alternative images—such as an image of a sweater on a model or
of a coffee table in a room—as significant. Women also appreciate a good deal more than their male
counterparts. 42% of women compared with 35% of men say online promotions and coupons are important
factors in their mobile shopping experience.
Men, however, like their mobile video. The presence of mobile video is one area that was rated by more men
than women (38% versus 28%) to increase the likelihood to buy.
ell, this post is all about charts and figures. Read on to get a glimpse of e-commerce outlook in
selected countries of Asia Pacific. Hopefully, you will get a rough idea on those markets that you
are not particularly familiar with.
Personally, I am not really convinced with how the penetration rate is weighted in the chart above.
Anyway, it is obvious that China has the biggest market in Asia and still with so much room to
grow. India on another hand is projected to overtake Japan as the second largest market in this
region.
Too bad that Malaysia is missing from the charts above but it is interesting to see that Thailand
seems to have good market potential in South East Asia. No wonder Rakuten buys into Thailand's
leading e-commerce company.
E-commerce has now become a prevalent activity amongst Australian online users - 80% of them
now shop online.
When Australians shop online 37% of them choose online payment system PayPal rather than
Visa (22%) as their preferred payment method.
When it comes to the online retailer who attracts the most Australian shoppers, there is one "clear
market leader" - eBay, with 56% of online shoppers having bought something from the site.
India currently has 28.1 million online shoppers in its country, which is forecast to mushroom to
203.1 million people come 2010.
When Indian online users do shop online, they, like the rest of the region's shoppers,
overwhelmingly prefer to use credit cards, with 60% of them saying they were their most
preferred form of online payment, the next popular method being debit cards (24% of users).
Indian online shoppers are more opportunistic than anyone else in the region, with 30% of
frequently making impulse purchases, compared to around 10% in Singapore, South Korea and
Australia, for example. The items they tend to snap up on impulse are home appliances and
electronic products (63% of users) and airline tickets (54%).
Nearly all Japanese Internet users shop online - the country has an online shopping penetration
rate of 97%.
More so than anyone else in Asia, the Japanese prefer paying for goods online with their credit
cards over any other form of payment method, with 70% of them saying that was the case.
Online shopping is the second most favoured online activity in Japan, after email.
South Koreans love to shop online. Among those who have Internet access, 99.9% have used it to
buy something - the highest online shopping penetration rate in the world.
South Korea's Cyworld is the world's second largest music and video retailer after iTunes.
South Korean's online music download market has grown to such an extent that now more music
is sold online than traditional offline channels.
Creating that first positive shopping experience is key in order to capture loyalty and money Malaysian online shoppers tend to stick to the shopping sites they are familiar with, with 60% of
saying they buy mostly from the same site.
Malaysian online shoppers mainly buy airline tickets or book travel reservations over the
Internet (55% of users), make tour / hotel reservations (41%) and buy computer hardware (22%).
Singaporeans love shopping: 80% of them have shopped online.
Singaporeans are also amongst the highest online spenders in Asia, spending on average
US$3,480 online over the period of one year, ahead of Japan, South Korean and Hong Kong.
Singaporean online shoppers like to plan their purchases rather than buy on a whim, with only 10%
of them making frequent opportunistic purchases.
Fashion and beauty are the two dominant segments in Taiwan's online shopping market, with
compound average growth rates of 88% (fashion) and 49% (beauty).
The statistics above are derived and summarized from Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Yearbook
2009, which can be downloaded here (requires registration).
Related post: Malaysia's E-Commerce Statistics
Selling becomes sociable
E-commerce is becoming more social and
more connected to the offline world
Online shopping
Sep 9th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
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A valiant explorer of the commerce-technology frontier
THOSE who cherish privacy will recoil in horror, but for digital exhibitionists it is a dream.
At Swipely, a web start-up, users can now publish their purchases. Whenever they swipe their
credit or debit card (hence the service’s name), the transaction is listed on the site—to be
discussed by other users. “Turn purchases into conversations” is the firm’s mantra.
Swipely is among the latest entrants in the growing field of social commerce. Firms in this
market combine e-commerce with social networks and other online group activities. They
aim to transform shopping both online and off. Angus Davis, Swipely’s boss, points out that
the internet has already disrupted the content industry. Commerce will be next, he says.
The first generation of e-commerce sites, which hit the web in the late 1990s, were essentially
digitised mail-order catalogues. Websites like Epinions collected user reviews and
recommendations, but they did not sell anything—and many collapsed during the dotcom
crash. Only Amazon brought together selling and social feedback, to great effect. By means
of collective filtering, it made suggestions based on other buyers’ purchases.
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The second generation of e-commerce firms is quite different. Few emerged from Silicon
Valley. Indeed, they tend to have offline roots, and sometimes seek to drive customers to
actual shops. Many make their money from flash sales—brief offers of steep discounts on
products—that are advertised to registered members.
The pioneer of flash sales, Vente Privée, grew out of the French apparel industry (the name
means “private sale”). Even today, its centre of gravity is offline, says Jacques-Antoine
Granjon, Vente Privée’s boss, who founded the firm in 2001 along with seven partners.
Hundreds of designers, photographers and hairstylists organise its online sales events. After a
slow start, Vente Privée has been growing quickly. Its five local sites in Europe have more
than 12m members and are expected to bring in about €800m ($1 billion) in revenues this
year.
Vente Privée’s success has inspired others. The best known is Gilt Groupe, which emulates
the sample sales of luxury retailers in New York, where it is based. Gilt is smaller than Vente
Privée. It has only 2.5m members and expects to turn over between $400m and $500m in
revenues this year. Gilt wants to become a platform for all sorts of social commerce, says
Susan Lyne, its boss. It recently launched several local sites in America, offering “deals of
the day”.
Gilt Groupe is straying into the territory of another clutch of city-based e-commerce sites,
which facilitate collective buying. Every day these sites offer the service of a local
business—a restaurant meal, a spa-treatment, the rental of an expensive car—at a discount of
up to 90% (they generally keep half of the sale price). But a deal is struck only if a minimum
number of members pounce. Buyers thus have an interest in spreading the word, which they
do mostly on social networks.
Until they drop
Many such sites have sprung up. The most successful is Groupon (a combination of the
words “group” and “coupon”, which buyers print out to pay for their service). Although the
firm launched only in late 2008, it already operates some 230 local websites in 29 countries
and boasts 15m subscribers. Flush with money from investors, it has embarked on a global
land-grab, buying Groupon clones in other countries, such as Germany’s CityDeal.
Groupon is more about people than technology. It grew out of The Point, a Chicago-based
website that offers tools to organise collective action. The firm employs a worldwide sales
force of nearly 2,000 to identify interesting local merchants and 150 writers to describe the
offers. It wants to be the company that finally allows small businesses to participate in ecommerce, explains Rob Solomon, its president.
Yet it may be a third generation of social-shopping sites that really deserves the label, says
Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. The latest batch of firms try to build their business
on top of the “social graph”: the network of friends spun on social networks. They make use
of virtual currencies and the growing popularity of smart-phones, which can track consumers’
location.
ModCloth, which sells clothing from independent designers, has an active forum on
Facebook and lets customers vote on which products the site should stock. Lockerz, another
upstart, pays members “pointz” if they watch videos with advertisements, invite friends and
do things with them. They can then use this currency to obtain discounts. Similarly, Shopkick
rewards consumers for offline activities such as visiting stores and scanning products with
their smart-phones.
For the new generation of e-commerce firms, the offline world is as important as the online
one. Swipely is a good example. By uploading transaction data, the start-up makes it easy for
customers to tell their friends how they are spending their money in the real world, something
they probably would not do if they had to type all the data in. At the same time, customers
can keep those transactions secret that they do not want to share.
Will making shopping more social really disrupt commerce as much as Mr Davis expects? It
is hard to predict whether the second and third generations of e-commerce sites will continue
their rapid growth. Consumers may tire of flash sales, as they did of online auctions. Even
collective buying may have its limits. One of Groupon’s biggest problems is that tens of
thousands of local firms want to be featured, but each of its sites offers only one deal per day.
The outfit has started to personalise some of its sites, meaning that different users will see
different deals depending on things like age, sex and interests. But if personalisation goes too
far, and users see only the sort of things they already knew they wanted, this kind of shopping
could become less fun.
Whatever the fate of individual firms and sales models, e-commerce is bound to become
more social, predicts Sonali de Rycker of Accel Partners, a venture-capital firm. Retailing has
several persistent problems: the high cost of attracting visitors, the low probability that they
become buyers and the difficulty of getting them to come back. Sociable e-commerce offers
potential solutions to all of them. So expect your favourite site to add social features, whereas
many of the pioneers will end up with arrows in their backs, as innovators often do.
Bleak Friday
Bricks-and-mortar shops struggle to win
customers back from virtual ones
Retail v e-tail in America
Nov 26th 2009 | NEW YORK | from PRINT EDITION
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Reuters
SHOPPERS on Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in America,
which falls on November 27th this year, are notoriously aggressive. Some even start queuing
outside stores before dawn to be the first to lay their hands on heavily discounted
merchandise. Last year berserk bargain-hunters in the suburbs of New York City trampled a
Wal-Mart employee to death. Despite the frenzy at many stores, however, the recession
appears to have accelerated the pace at which shoppers are abandoning bricks and mortar in
favour of online retailers—e-tailers, in the jargon. So this year Black Friday (so named
because it is supposed to put shops into profit for the year) also marks the start of many
conventional retailers’ attempts to regain the initiative.
E-commerce holds particular appeal in straitened times as it enables people to compare prices
across retailers quickly and easily. Buyers can sometimes avoid local sales taxes online, and
shipping is often free. No wonder, then, that online shopping continues to grow even as the
offline sort shrinks. In 2008 retail sales grew by a feeble 1% in America and are expected to
decline by more than 3% this year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade body.
In contrast, online sales grew by 13% in 2008 to over $141 billion and are predicted to grow
by 11% in 2009, according to Forrester, a consultancy.
Online sales now account for 6% of all retail sales in America (up from 5% in 2008) and that
figure is expected to reach 8% by 2013. E-commerce is also growing in Europe and Asia,
where online sales in 2008 totalled $60 billion and $40 billion, respectively. In Britain,
internet shopping now accounts for nearly 4% of total retail sales, according to Planet Retail,
a research firm.
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Online-only shopping sites such as Amazon and eBay, two e-commerce giants, have thrived
in the downturn. Amazon’s sales rose to around $5.5 billion in the third quarter of the year,
up by almost 30% from a year before. Listings, chiefly from commercial vendors, have
surged so rapidly on eBay that its website briefly crashed on November 21st.
The range of items available online is also growing. Amazon has started selling groceries.
Consumer-goods companies such as Procter & Gamble (P&G) are encouraging the sale of
things like nappies (diapers) and laundry detergent online. At the opposite extreme, the
internet is also being used to sell luxury goods. Fabergé, a defunct jewellery-maker known
for its gem-encrusted eggs, relaunched in September. It will not open any shops but will
instead operate only online.
The shift in spending to the internet is good news for companies like P&G that lack retail
outlets of their own. But it is a big concern for brick-and-mortar retailers, whose prices are
often higher than those of e-tailers, since they must bear the extra expense of running stores.
Happily, however, conventional retailers are in a better position to fight back than last year,
when overstocking forced them to resort to ruinous discounting. Inventories are about 15%
lower this year. Some big retailers, such as Saks and Target, have recently reported rising
revenues and margins.
The most obvious response to the growth of e-tailing is for conventional retailers to redouble
their own efforts online. The online arms of big retailers are performing well, on the whole.
Saks, for example, saw online sales rise 9% in the nine months to the end of October while
sales in its stores fell by 19%. The company expects online growth to outpace sales in stores
for the “foreseeable future”, says Stephen Sadove, its boss.
The concept of “multichannel” shopping, where people can buy the same items from the
same retailer in several different ways—online, via their mobile phones and in shops—is
gaining ground, and retailers are trying to encourage users of one channel to try another.
Growing online traffic may actually increase sales in stores too. According to a spokesman
for Macy’s, a department-store chain, every dollar a consumer spends online with Macy’s
leads to $5.70 in spending at a Macy’s store within ten days, because consumers learn about
other products online and come into stores to look them over before buying them. Many
online retailers offer tools that let people locate the nearest outlet that has a given item in
stock.
Retailers are also trying make shopping seem fun and exciting to counteract the economic
gloom. One common tactic is to set up “pop-up” stores, which appear for a short time before
vanishing again, to foster a sense of novelty and urgency. Following the lead of many bricksand-mortar outfits, eBay recently launched a pop-up in New York where customers could
inspect items before ordering them from kiosks.
Shoppers are increasingly looking for an “experience” when they go to stores, says Jack
Anderson of Hornall Anderson, a branding and marketing firm, and are no longer interested
in purely “transaction-based bricks and mortar stores”. Apple, which encourages customers to
try out its devices in its stores, is considered a pioneer of this strategy, and has attracted many
imitators. The Walt Disney Company, for example, is rumoured to be redesigning its stores to
attract shoppers looking for entertainment, with new features such as “magic mirrors”, which
will allow children to play with Disney characters.
Stores are also trying to lure customers by offering services that are not available online. Best
Buy, a consumer-electronics retailer, has started selling music lessons along with its musical
instruments. Lululemon athletica, which sells sports clothes, offers free yoga classes. The
idea is to bring people back to its shops regularly, increasing the likelihood that they will
develop the habit of shopping there.
Another great hope is that mobile phones will come to the rescue of conventional retailers.
Some consumers already use internet-enabled handsets to shop online. But many analysts
think a technology called near-field communication (NFC) might boost sales at stores, by
allowing shoppers to scan products with their phones to learn more about them, and then to
pay by swiping their phones at the till. Unfortunately, NFC will not be widely available for
some time—too late to help harried retailers through Black Friday.
When cheap is exclusive
Hard times for luxury retailers are good
times for discount fashion websites
Selling designer goods online
Sep 3rd 2009 | New York | from PRINT EDITION
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In a few weeks it will all be on Rue La LaAlamy
THE racks of expensive gowns and shoes sit, serene and mostly untouched, on the floors of
Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s and almost every fancy department
store. In a sign of how consumers’ newfound thrift has hurt luxury retailers, Saks
Incorporated, the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, recently announced losses of more
than $50m in the three months to July. Sales are down more than 20%. The recession, it
seems, has spelt an end to Americans’ appetite for luxury—at department-store prices, at any
rate.
Yet luxury e-tailers, which sell designer goods online at discounted prices, are flourishing.
The slowdown has actually helped them, simultaneously producing seemingly endless
supplies of unsold inventory and forcing consumers to tighten their belts. That has let
American e-tailers such as Gilt Groupe, HauteLook and Rue La La, and their French rival
Vente-privee.com, sell last season’s designer apparel for as much as 80% off the original
price.
But low prices are not the websites’ only allure. Their sites are open only to those who have
received an e-mail inviting them to join from another member. This lends them an air of
exclusivity and creates the sort of buzz marketers crave, says Adam Bernhard, the boss of
HauteLook. The sites also put new items on sale at the same time every day for a limited
period, usually no more than 24 hours. That makes shopping an urgent and competitive daily
activity for many members. (Cleverly, the sites do not say how many items of each size and
colour they have, so customers feel even more pressure to buy right away, lest they miss out
on the last pair of size 37 hazel Jimmy Choo pumps.)
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A special report on the rich: Bling on a budgetApr 2nd 2009
Luxury goods: The lapse of luxuryFeb 24th 2009
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Designers, for their part, can use the sites to get rid of stock quickly and discreetly, sparing
them the disgrace of seeing their heavily discounted products lingering on sale racks in full
public view. Most consumers do not even know which designers are available through luxury
e-tailers until they become members. The sites shield themselves from search engines, so
they do not pop up in response to online searches for the brands they offer. That has
encouraged grand firms like Cartier to sell their wares through them.
Ben Fischman, the boss of Rue La La, which started in 2008 and expects to have revenues
this year of around $130m, thinks the “theatrical environment” of his site keeps customers
hooked. He says retailers became complacent during the boom years and failed to make the
most of new technology. Rue La La recently launched an iPhone application to make it easy
for members to make purchases while on the move. It has also started selling wine, spa
services and travel packages in addition to clothes. Vente-privee.com has even sold yachts
and apartments.
Although none of the sites has yet reached Amazon-like proportions, they are doing well. Gilt,
which was launched by two graduates of Harvard Business School in 2007, has over 1.4m
members in America; it expects revenue of $400m next year. Vente-privee, which started in
2001, says its membership is 8m, up 42% from last year. Even Net-A-Porter, a popular etailer that offers designer merchandise at full price, is doing well. It recently launched a
discount site, called the OutNet, because it does not want to lose out on the booming discount
market.
E-tailers are also looking to expand geographically. Vente-privee.com has operations in
Germany, Britain and Spain as well as France. Gilt recently launched a site in Japan that has
over 200,000 members.
Retailers, however, are fighting back through their own websites. Neiman Marcus, for
example, has started offering sales of limited duration to selected customers, in an attempt to
mimic the “insider” feeling that the fashion e-tailers trade on. There is talk of new technology
to make shopping both easier (through software that would allow buyers to assess whether a
particular cut will be flattering for their build) and more social (through chat rooms, for
example).
However, Hamilton South, a founding partner of HL Group, a retail consultancy, thinks the
future of luxury retail may not be online but on television. He believes that viewers will soon
be able to use their remote controls to buy the clothing that appears in the programmes they
are watching. Retailers need to stop thinking about making shopping entertaining, he says,
and concentrate on making entertainment “shopable” instead.