Emerging Mobile Commerce Development Trends, Opportunities and Challenges in 2017 and Beyond

According to Forrester research, by end of 2017 U.S mobile users will spend $90 via mobile pay-ments. That is a 48% increase over the $12.8 billion spent in 2012.

Gartner forecasted that in 2017 U.S consumers’ mobile engagement behavior will push up mobile commerce revenue to 50 percent of U.S. digital commerce revenue.

What the leading market analysts have predicted is validated by spiraling growth of the mobile pay-ment industry.

Mobile payment has become a competitive arena. Market leaders like Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Pay-Pal, Venmo, V.me (by Visa), Masterpass (by MasterCard) and more are trying to consolidate their po-sition in the face of growing competition fueled by new entrants.

The rapid growth of mobile payment industry is a strong indicator that mobile commerce is the future of the e-commerce.

Looking into in the near future, 2017 and beyond let’s explore the emerging m-commerce trends, op-portunities and challenges.

But first, you should understand the benefits of optimizing e-commerce business for mobile devices.

Benefits of Mobile Commerce

Merchants are optimizing their business for mobile phones as applications at a greater speed than be-fore because of the far-reaching benefits.

1. Push notifications deliver personalized offers to potential customers, 24x7. This precise targeting improves conversion rate. According to one survey76% customers in the age group of 18 to 34 have enabled push notifications on their mobile devices.

2. Constant contact and complete access at fingertips is the key to success in a very competitive en-vironment. Mobile apps have features like live chats, one-click calling, offers, catalogs, and help-desk. Users in an instant get the desired information. This positively impacts users and speeds up conversion rate.

3. Location based notifications are more local and personal in nature. They help businesses convert more and generate higher revenues. Location tracking also brings more foot traffic to the physical store.

4. The in-app payment feature gives consumers the opportunity to avail premium and personalized offerings with special discounts. The user can pay through Apple Pay (iOS) and Google Wallet (An-droid). Mobile is a digital wallet with pre-paid account that can be debited for a purchase. Such im-provisations improve user experience, attract more customers and convert better.

5. Brand or company apps give the user a seamless user experience by optimizing exclusive content, daily deals and personalized discount coupons. They attract new customers to the business and at the same time help retain the existing one.

Emerging Trends

2017 promises to be a trendsetter for mobile commerce. There will increase adoption of latest technol-ogy, concepts, and features. Though many, the top 5 advancements that will see greater adoption by the mobile commerce merchants are:

1. Mobile Image Recognition will make snap-to-buy a convenient feature

Mobile Image Recognition (MIR) technology is bridging the gap between the virtual and real world in a snap. In other words, MIR app is virtual world’s equivalent to window shopping in the real world. Mobile users will snap a product on the move – in the street, on board a flight, at a party – anywhere. Feed the image to MIR-driven app that will identify it and flash offers from different retailers on the mobile phone screen. The user in one touch completes the purchase.

2. Video content will be soul of the mobile commerce

A report by Cisco says that by 2020 video will make up more than 80 % of Internet traffic. E-com-merce merchants use videos for product descriptions, customer service, advertisements, and customer testimonials. With the advent of faster mobile internet broadband and of 4G LTE, mobile users will consume rich media content, easy and fast. This will enable the easy shift of video content marketing efforts to mobile devices. 2017 is the year when e-commerce stores will use videos to their full poten-tial.

3. Rise in Mobile Apps with augmented reality

More numbers of merchants will use augmented reality mobile apps to give mobile shoppers an inter-active, immersive experience with their products. Consumers will virtually try products on their mo-bile screens; wear them and take photos before they buy them. 2017 will see a dramatic rise in interac-tive Apps like Ink Hunter or Lenskart .

4. Personalized e-commerce experience will reign

Mobile apps with in-store personalization push-up user experience to a higher level. The apps make shopping a quick, easy and wonderful experience in following ways:

• The in-store map or merchant locator guides the customer to product/service/merchant

• Push notifications on customized deals and offers

• Tailored suggestions based on past search or purchase history

The advent of blue-tooth powered Beacon technology in the stores has made it easy for the store own-ers give personalized shopping experience to their customers, the moment they enter their store.

5. NFC-enabled payment will increase

Near Field Communication technology allows easy peer-to-peer sharing of files and transfer of mobile payments. Simply waving mobile phone synced with bank cards on the payment terminal expedites the payment. More numbers of consumers will do that in 2017.

Online shoppers tap their NFC-enabled bank cards, when prompted, to complete the checkout process. This will make checkout a smoother, faster process and improve the user experience.

Important Indicators that show rapid growth of mobile commerce

1. Explosive growth of Smartphone Users

Stastisa estimates that by 2017, there will be 222.29 million Smartphone users in the USA and the smartphone penetration rate is predicted at 64%of total population of North America.

2. More e-commerce is coming from Smartphone

According to emarketer, US mobile commerce sales witnessed a major breakthrough in 2016 when it more than doubled the figures of the year 2014. The figure of $123.13 billion in 2016 is predicted to touch the $15.1billion mark in 2017. The reasons are; greater Smartphone penetration in US popula-tion; superior user experience available on the larger mobile screens; faster mobile search and better context-based discovery.

3. B2B mobile commerce is growing

B2B marketers are now increasingly leveraging the mobile commerce to push up sales. B2B gener-ates 19.4% of digital commerce revenue from mobile channels compared to B2C’s 22.6%. Though less, B2B is poised to outrun BRC in mobile commerce in short time because 50% are B2B buyers are tech-savvy, young mobile users, who are decision makers, influencers or stakeholders. A research re-port by KRC research in 2015 concluded that 70% of millennial used mobile apps to buy products. A jump of 85% compared to 2014. This figure is predicted to spike further in 2017.

4. Mobile Apps market is looking up

Amazon has it. eBay has it. Starbucks has it. The famous brands have apps for their mobile users. Others are following the suit. For one simple reason- more and more internet users are taking the mo-bile route to shop online. On research found out that apps help generate more revenues than a mobile browser and desktop based on the customer spend per transaction.

But this is not only the reason why apps market is growing.

comScore and Flurry Analytics and carried out two separate studies. The reports confirmed that mo-bile users spent more time on apps compared to mobile web. The 86:14 (app: mobile web usage) ratio shows apps dominate the mobile shopping time. Since users spend more time of apps, the apps drive more converting traffic to mobile commerce sites. A survey by Criteo found out that retail mobile apps convert 3.7 times more than mobile web.

Challenges

Mobile commerce is growing at a break-neck speed but come hurdles in the way. There are “chal-lenges to overcome” to take the mobile revolution to the next level. As mobile commerce grows so does the competition and this puts immense pressure on the m-commerce merchants to provide the top-notch user experience. Mere spending on creating new business models or offering new products will not serve the purpose. The future of mobile commerce depends on upon the user experience. Hence companies need to invest heavily in research, development, and integration of innovative tech-nology that will improve user experience and take it to a higher level. Before they do that, mobile commerce companies need to address other challenges that require immediate attention.

The mobile operating environment is scattered and lacks standardization, compared to that of wired web. Mobile network lag behind because of following constraints:

• Different device operating systems and platforms, middleware and networks

• Device constraints like limited memory, tiny screens, poor resolutions, weak processors

• Current data speed comes at an expensive price.

The success of m-commerce depends on upon Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) based devices and services systems that seamlessly interoperate without causing security issues. This will get rid of the major shortcomings in mobile’s scattered operating environment and make it universal and safer.

The M- Commerce Development Opportunity

We live in a wired world. It is projected that by 2020 there will be 50 billion objects connected to-gether (wired and wireless). This offers a great opportunity for the m-commerce to step into new do-mains like:

1. Appliance-to-appliance : Appliances interact with automated service scheduler

2. Appliance-to-business : Smart appliances send repair alerts to service provider

3. Appliance-to-consumer: Appliance sends routine maintenance alerts to consumer

4. Consumer-to- appliance: Remote activation of the smart appliances

Entrepreneur Adoption

As an e-commerce entrepreneur, m-commerce adoption becomes an important milestone in your ven-ture. Though adoption phase may be prone to integration problems, but nonetheless mobile commerce is critical to your success in the fast-moving, fiercely-completive and technologically demanding world of e-commerce.

Here are important practical steps to take to prepare your business for m-commerce.

1. Make the website, portal, and applications compliant to wireless.

2. Remote/on-site collaboration is increasing, due to better integration of wireless technology. Add wireless application protocol (WAP) applications to your existing e-commerce architecture to enable real-time sharing of data in remote locations.

3. Mobile technology helps in work collaboration across barriers of time and location. Small to big businesses can empower their workers to interact in real-time, share data and take informed decisions on different hand-held devices like Smartphone, palmtops, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), lap-tops, notebooks that are web-enabled.

4. Using 4G or higher bandwidth (available at the time) will speed up higher data flow across the devices and improve the user experience.

5. The m-commerce system should be device independent. It should run on the variety of mobile device platforms – WAP, JavaMIDP, Palm, Symbian iQuartzi, and iCrystali.

6. Ensure compliance to different wireless bearers like WAP, SMS, GPRS and UMTS

7. Set-up identification, authentication, access control, and end-to-end data encryption in the secu-rity mechanism of the m-commerce system.

8. Ensure exactly-once-execution at a time in all the m-commerce transactions. This is necessary when stocks or expensive items are purchased.

9. Push notifications to the customer to inform about the shipment, out of stock status or when credit is not charged. They all happen after the shopper has completed the purchase transaction.

Development Aspects

With the new generation of smartphones and other handheld devices, mobile users are fast becoming a major part of the web scenario. A mobile website takes your business to millions of mobile users around the world. The skyrocketing Smartphone sales and rapid integration in the global population point out that more consumers want information about products/ services, access to the database from their mobile devices. This new user behavior has a positive impact on the buying outcome.

Keeping this in the mind you should adopt following mobile commerce development strategies.

• Application design should be mobile user-centric

• Mobile applications run on should have Client-agent-server architecture

• Stringent security mechanism should be integrated to prevent data theft, leakage, and fraud in the wireless network.

• Mobile applications should be based on the latest Internet development technologies and tools. This includes modern application servers.

Conclusion

M-commerce has bright future. The emerging trends, development and integration of latest Internet tools & technologies, rapid Smartphone integration in the population and the paradigm shift of con-sumers to mobile shopping signal a new revolution that waiting to unfold in 2017 and beyond.

Perception System has remained forefront in mobile commerce development. With almost a decade of mobile development experience, Perception System has delivered path-breaking mobile apps over the time. As mobile commerce moves on the higher level Perception System is well poised to deliver in-novative, cost-effective and trending technology based mobile commerce solutions.