Mobile Shopping and the Just-in-Time Consumer:

U.S. consumers are changing the way they shop, and one has to wonder what role mobile shopping applications could have in the future, based on those changes. It isn't just that people can use, and do use, their mobiles for product research and evaluations. There is a physical dimension as well.

A study by Nielsen finds that consumers are making more small trips to the store, even as they also increase trips to big-box supercenters and club retail channels for larger purchases. Both behaviors are typical of the most-affluent shoppers, not just the rest.

Trips with a smaller sales volume are of greater importance to the grocery, drug, convenience, gas and dollar channels, but trips resulting in larger purchase voluems are gaining ground. Here too there are differences across income classification, providing opportunities for retailer/store-specific and consumer segment trip-type solutions.

Shopping trips are segmented into four types, according to Nielsen. "Immediate" trips tend to be conducted for low-value products for which there is an immediate need, and tend to average sales of $15 per trip. "Fill-In" trips feature slightly higher value baskets averaging $51 per trip.

"Routine" trips are weekly, high-value shopping trips averaging $98 per trip while "Stock-up" trips average $242 per trip.

By household income, affluent households ($100,000 or more) ncreased the percentage of smaller trips within supercenters and club stores, and drove more frequent and larger trips in smaller formats such as drug, convenience and dollar stores.

The $70,000 to $99,000 income households reduced larger trips across most channels, but increased smaller trips within supercenters and club stores. Stock-up trips were generally off among these households.

$50k – $69.9k – Middle income households ($50,000 to $69,900) shopped less frequently overall while increasing their trips to value-centric supercenters and dollar stores.

Households in the $40,000 to $49.900 income range decreased trips across most channels, but these households increased their immediate, fill-in and routine trips to club stores, with smaller and stock-up trips to dollar stores also up.

Households in the $30,000 to $39,900 income range increased the number of small trips and supercenter trips, but stock-up trips declined by 10 percent in that channel.

Households in the $20,000 to $29.900 range slightly increased trips to smaller supercenter and club trips, while stock-up trips declined by 10 percent. Dollar stores are performing well among this income group that retailers are targeting.

Households with income less than $20,000 made drastic cutbacks on small grocery trips, while increasing larger grocery and club trips. This may be indicative of pay period buying behavior. This income group shows big drops in larger supercenter trips and softness in dollar store trips.

One might argue that mobile marketers should focus on the fewer trips with higher volume. Those trips tend to be for "repeat" purchase items where a chance to switch brand preference could have long-lasting impact. But one might also argue that there are truly few products, even those bought on "immediate" trips, that do not have brand preference angles. In fact, even before a shopper has a chance to choose between brands on the shelves, a prior decision has been made to visit a particular retail outlet.

The issue is the role mobile marketing can play in shifting locational preference before a shopper is physically in aisles, and then to shift brand preference while shoppers are in the store, shopping. Obviously, mobile marketers will, by default, wind up focusing more on higher-income households to a large extent, because those are the homes with smartphones. But that is going to change over time, as the smartphone becomes the standard device.

The Just-in-Time Consumer: How Shopping Trips Align with Economic Woes | Nielsen Wire

Google Makes Comparison Shopping Easier

Google has introduced a new feature for product searching in the United Kingdom, called "Nearby Shops."

Nearby Shops shows stores in a user's vicinity that sell what a user is searching for. As you can well imagine, this is going to help steer users to "stuff" they want, but also could lead to an increase comparison shopping behavior, since it will be easy to find other locations that might have the same items, in case a user decides a price or other item elements are not right.

Google Launches Nearby Shops In UK | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

51% of U.K. Mobile Users Use Mobile Commerce; 41% of Brands Will Create Mobile Apps or Sites

About 41 percent  of U.K. retail brands expect to have a transactional mobile site or application within the next year, according to a study by the Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment, the Internet Advertising Bureau and Interactive Media in Retail Group.

But 51 percent of mobile phone-owning UK consumers (22.95 million people) have used mobile commerce apps and features.

About 43 percent have used their mobiles to conduct research. About 35 percent report they have used mobile to enhance the shopping experience.

About 37 percent have charged a purchase to their mobile phone bills and 27 percent have used their mobiles to buy goods and charged the purchase to their debit card, credit card or PayPal account.

The study found that while mobile commerce is still very much at the consideration stage, the majority of retailers surveyed expect mobile commerce to be part of their main strategy within the next 12 months.

The survey of 140 marketing professionals from the retail, advertising and mobile service provider sectors in the U.K. also found that 59 percent of the senior-level representatives from U.K. retail brands that took part expected their mobile revenues to increase over the next 12 months, and 94 percent saw it as a real opportunity for their business.

Each month in the U.K. 4.2 million consumers are visiting retailers’ websites using the mobile internet. However, just four out of the top 20 most frequently visited retailer websites are presently optimized for mobile, and only eight of the top 20 have any kind of mobile application for smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry or Android powered devices.

Whilst most retailers believe their mobile revenues will increase over the next few years, currently around 63 percent either make less than one percent of their total revenues via mobile, or don’t measure their mobile revenues at all at present.

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Enterprises Dominate Mobile Ad Spending

More than a third of interactive marketers have implemented or plan to pilot mobile search and display advertising in the next year, according to Forrester Research analyst Melissa Parrish. And just about everyone believes such spending will grow.

For that reason, Forrester Research expects that interactive marketer spending on mobile search and display will grow at a 28 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years.

Forrester expects that mobile Internet usage will increase at a compound annual rate of 12.7 percent, with 117 million people — 36 percent of the US population — searching and browsing while using their mobile devices by 2015, Parrish says.

Mobile marketing opportunities will grow as more people use the mobile Internet, of course. At the end of 2007, only 10 percent of U.S. adult subscribers used the mobile Internet. In 2010, mobile Internet usage is up to 27 percent of mobile subscribers, representing 64 million consumers in the
United States market.

Mobile Internet users also are learning to use their mobiles to make purchases. And they aren’t just looking for the nearest coffee house; they’re buying airline tickets, researching cars, and receiving coupons for products like coffee or detergent.

Forrester forecasts that mobile search and display dollars will grow to $2.8 billion by 2015, at a
28 percent CAGR.

But critical mass still is lacking. Though mobile Internet usage is increasing rapidly, marketers still can’t get enough eyeballs on content to justify spending big bucks in the space, says Parrish.

Currently, 78 percent of the US population access the Internet at least monthly while only 21 percent access the mobile Internet. By 2015, mobile Internet usage is expected to reach 43 percent of total desktop Internet usage, making the mobile medium a much more viable channel.

Inability to track performance against spend. More than half of interactive marketers feel they have no capability to measure the ROI or brand impact of their mobile marketing campaigns.

Interactive marketers prefer performance-based campaigns and are willing to pay more for these metrics. Vendors like Google and Bing offer cost-per-click pricing for click-to-call and click-to-get-directions type activities, but mobile display is still largely based on potential impressions, an unsatisfactory metric to most marketers.

Additionally, the holy grail of mobile is location-based marketing, but it’s still unclear how the connection between location-marketing efforts and in-store purchases will occur. Vendors must develop the tools for marketers to track performance and then help marketers understand the value and how to use these new tools.

·Spending by small and mid-sized business is not having too much impact, says Parrish. Forrester’s data suggests that fully 95 percent of mobile advertising dollars currently come from companies with more than $100 million in revenue.

Though the value of mobile advertising is highly relevant to small and mid-sized businesses, which benefit greatly from local and location-specific advertising, smaller budgets and less marketing
expertise will make the percentage of overall spend from SMBs consistently less than eight percent of total mobile spend.

Concerns over privacy, specifically location and carrier information, could provoke a backlash among consumers, leading to some caution as well. Consumers consider mobile phones personal devices to a greater extent than PCs and, for that reason, might continue to expect greater privacy in a mobile context, Parrish suggests.

Appcelerator, PayPal Team for Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce is a huge business opportunity because, at least in the United States, there is not much infrastructure to support it, though that appears to be changing fast. One example is Appcelerator's recent integration with PayPal, which will allow smartphone apps to use PayPal more easily as a mobile payment mechanism.

Now iPhone, Android and iPad developers using the paid version of the company’s Titanium framework get the ability to conduct mobile commerce.

App Buyers Prefer Carrier or Credit Card Billing

There's an interesting bit of data in a recent Nielsen survey of users about smartphone and feature phone applications and behavior.

Specifically, users have clear preferences when it comes to how they want to pay for mobile apps, opening a wedge for service providers who want to increase the amount of commerce and payment services they can support and derive revenue from.

Given that users’ primary concerns are convenience and security, Nielsen found that users would prefer to have charges appear on their mobile service provider or credit card bills.

The immediate issue is that the most-popular app stores are not controlled or sponsored by mobile operators, but by the handset suppliers. Many think that is a good thing.

But the survey data also suggests a potential new role for mobile service providers as suppliers of third-party billing services. About 32 percent of both smartphone and feature phone users say they prefer to have payments billed on their mobile service statements.

About 31 percent say they currently pay by credit card, but only 24 percent they prefer to pay that way. About 20 percent say they use PayPal, and that's the same percentage of users who say they prefer to pay that way.

About 13 percent pay using iTunes, but just 11 percent say they prefer to pay that way.

QuickPay Unveils Mobile Credit Card Swiper

In partnership with ROAM Data, QuickPay Merchant Services nows offer the ROAMpay credit card swiper for smart phones.

The ROAMpay device allows merchants who use smart phones to process credit cards wirelessly safely. This swiper is compatible with the iPhone, Blackberry, and Droid and also be used with the new Apple iPad. Merchants will have all the same functions as using a traditional credit card terminal but just will have the ability to accept payments in remote locations.

QuickPay Next to Market With Mobile Credit Card Swiper ROAMpay

What Every Exec Needs To Know About The Future of eCommerce Technology | Forrester Blogs

Mobile e-commerce is going to happen in the cloud, or not at all, one might conclude from some Forrester Research findings.

On average, 8.85 different hosts were involved in delivering an e-ommerce transaction this year in the United States, and it was even slightly higher for German eCommerce transactions.

This year, nearly 20 percent of e-commerce transactions across more than 200 sites included at least one piece of content served by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) solution. In other words, 20 percent of e-commerce transactions already rely on cloud services provided by Amazon alone.

And appetite for such solutions seems to be growing. About 54 percent of executives are interested in moving to e-commerce solutions based on software-as-a-service.

What Every Exec Needs To Know About The Future of eCommerce Technology | Forrester Blogs:

Mobiles for E-Commerce: 12% of Users

According to the Mobile Marketing Association, about 12 percent of consumers recently surveyed report having used their mobiles to get coupons or other promotions, buy goods or services using the mobile device.

Some 17 percent say they have used their handsets to purchase applications or other digital content. Given current penetration of smartphones, somewhere above 30 percent of the installed base of all mobile phones, those are impressive statistics, since it implies more than half of all smartphone users have downloaded apps, while about 40 percent have used their mobiles for digitally-delivered coupons or promotions.

Digital Marketing Blog:

eBay Expects $1.5 Billion in 2010 Merchandise Sales Using Mobile Apps

Online retailer eBay is launching two iPhone apps, one for the eBay.com global marketplace and one for eBay’s new classifieds site, eBayClassifieds.com, part of its plan to sell $1.5 billion worth of merchandise directly from mobile sites.

With the new eBay Selling and eBay Classifieds mobile apps, consumers can easily photograph and list an item in 60 seconds or less, eBay says. Consumers can now list for free in eBay’s auction format, reaching 90 million active eBay users around the world, or in eBay Classifieds, to reach buyers in their local communities.

Plus, in addition to selling, buying has never been easier with eBay’s leading mobile shopping app and mobile platform and the new eBay Classifieds mobile app.

On April 3, eBay will take mobile commerce a step further, with a new version of the eBay app for iPad. The company earlier had released a mobile app for Android devices as well.

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Bharti Airtel Introduces Mobile Bazaar

Can text messaging be used to create a mobile version of eBay in India? Bharti Airtel intends to find out, by introducing "Mobile Bazaar," a way to buy and sell virtually anything that is legal using a standard mobile phone capable of text messaging.

The SMS-based service enables buyers and sellers to find each other and conduct transactions with each other using only text messaging, especially short codes, with no need for a mobile browser or data connection.

For starters, Bharti has set up a community for trading mobile phone devices, and will create similar communities for real estate, automobiles and electronics.

The initiative is interesting for the same reason many such innovations are throughout much of the world. Though mobile broadband will be a more-logical approach in markets such as the United States, there are many markets where text messaging and voice are the two ubiquitous communication modes.

In many places, a simple text message in the morning can give a farmer what he or she needs to know before settingout on a seven-mile walk to market. That's very valuable, in terms of fostering economic development.

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