Growth of Mobile Commerce in Recent Times





Mobile commerce has recently experienced a fantastic growth spurt. And why not? The drop in the price of handsets and the reduced tariffs has contributed largely to the growth of mobile commerce worldwide. Earlier, the usefulness of mobile commerce applications was brought under the scanner. But with almost every retailers coming up with an app of their own, there is no doubt that m-commerce is here to stay.

The online luxury retailer The Gilt Groupe has launched an app for iPad and within just 3 days the app was responsible for generating 3% of the total sales. Officials at Gilt had predicted that the app would become popular, but they had not anticipated that it would happen so quickly. The mobile shopping application developed by Gilt will soon become one of their main revenue earners.

But a recent survey conducted among 400 online retailers has shown that almost 80% of them still don't have any mobile commerce application for the convenience of their consumers. The difficulty lies in the factor that just optimizing their e-commerce sites are not enough. The m-commerce strategy has to be built up on an entirely new foundation after considering the requirements of customers. It should always be" What do the customers want while using an on-the-move shopping application?" A mobile commerce strategy should be available for all mobile commerce platforms such as Blackberry, iPhone or Android. As a retailer you should not confine yourself to one platform because it limits your reach to prospective customers on other platforms.

The Mobile Marketing Association had partnered with Luth Research and conducted a survey in mid 2010 which showed that about one in five mobile owners in the United States have used atleast one m-commerce app. The figure is expected to rise much higher in 2011 with people becoming more tech-savvy and of course due to the convenience and ease of usage of the apps.

Research companies predict a greater growth curve in the coming years. Coda Research Consultancy predicts that mobile commerce sales will soar up to a record 23.8 billion dollars in 2015 and will comprise 8.5% of the e-commerce revenues. This is a significant and noteworthy rise from 1.2 billion dollars in 2009 and 2.42 billion in 2010. The reason for this success is due to lots of creative and user-friendly apps coming up in the market on a regular basis and the familiarity of people using mobile Internet.