As more and more brands get used to using mobile for marketing and CRM, the next logical step will be to move into mobile commerce.

Brandbank has conducted an in-depth survey into the attitudes and expectations of consumers around mobile commerce. They found that smartphone owners are already well advanced, but the rest of the market has a long way to go.

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Brandbank is a company that creates, manages and distributes the images and data necessary to allow consumers to make an informed choice when purchasing products from a multi-channel retailers. They based this m-commerce study on information from over 2,000 respondents in the UK.

Not surprisingly, smartphone owners were much more active in m-commerce when compared with the rest of the market. For example,

• 47% said they used their phone to buy a product online using the phone’s internet connection. For non-smartphone owners, the number was only 9%.
• Similarly, 34% of smartphone owners said they use their phone for price comparison and to find the cheapest price, whereas only 2% of the other subscribers engaged in this activity.
• Only 19% of smartphone owners said they do not use their phone at all to help them shop, for non-smartphone owners the figure is 85%!

The survey also looked at consumer attitudes to mobile transactions. Fully 10% of the people reported that they don’t make purchases because they don’t know how. For the ones that do make mobile purchases, it isn’t always a smooth transaction: only 4% felt that the experience of making mobile purchases could be called “hassle-free”.

When asked about the causes of negative purchasing experiences, the need to zoom in and out to view all the information was a top problem, as well as slow page loading. And when asked how they responded to this kind of negative experience, the most common answer was that the consumer would simply do an internet search for the product, meaning that the original retailer would most likely lose the sale. Only 10% of respondents indicated they would have the patience to repeatedly try to load the original m-commerce site.

Overall, this study reveals an industry that is just emerging. A certain section of the population - the early adopter smartphone owners - is quite active, but the rest of the people in the market haven’t really decided that this is something they want to do. And for those people that are actively trying m-commerce, the journey is not smooth yet, there are still quite a few significant usability hurdles remaining.

Hopefully this sort of customer insight research will help the industry identify the key issues that are impeding growth, and focus on making the customer experience as good as possible.

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26.07.2010    Tags: Market Resources, mobile commerce, UK