Summer has finally arrived. And with the sunshine we all crawl out from under our duvets and hit the streets – and that means shopping, al fresco dining and generally enjoying everything the high street (and back gardens in some cases) has to offer.
Having all your potential online customers out enjoying the sunshine used to mean glum faces for eCommerce retailers (and some high street retailers too) as people’s minds weren’t generally on buying, but on baking (themselves).
But the growth in mobile as a commerce channel looks set to challenge this idea, as consumers are now more connected than ever (in theory, at least) and this opens up opportunities to sell to them while they sunbathe. Location-based mobile marketing, which can also take into account what your potential customers may be doing as they do it.
This is a significant step forward in the growth of mCommerce. Making it something that any business can do has the potential to turn mobile into a truly universal shopping and spending experience.
But while this is good news for consumers there is one big problem: connectivity.
While research from Forrester suggests that across Europe m-commerce is already netting some €1.7billion a year in 2011 and that it could hit €19billion by 2017, there is an increasingly wide disconnect (literally and metaphorically) between what consumers want to do and what they are actually able to do while out and about.
Research by eBay suggests that by 2016, the UK economy alone could gain some £4.5billion from mobile shopping, but this won’t happen until the networks are fast enough, cheap enough and available everywhere for consumers not to have to think about responding to an offer or whipping out their phone to buy something on a whim while they lick ice cream or surf on their smartphone from the comfort of their deckchair.
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