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Much has been made of mobile applications as branding and advertising vehicles, but they're also playing a role in encouraging m-commerce, according to a new study. The survey by electronics comparison shopping site Retrevo found the proportion of people that had bought something with their cell phones had doubled to 20% in just the last four months.
Of those who have made a mobile purchase, 42% did so using applications capable of transactions. Further, the iPhone, which offers some 200,000 apps, was the most popular type of smartphone when it came to mobile shopping.
Since consumers have flocked to mobile apps because they've typically provided a smoother user experience than mobile Web sites, it makes sense apps would gain ground as shopping tools.
But Retrevo's latest Pulse Report found mobile users are still apprehensive about transferring credit card information to their phone. When asked what would make them more likely to buy something from a retailer via cell phone, 24% said not having to provide credit card information, and 13% said if credit card data was already stored with a retailer.
That suggests the easier retailers make it for customers to store account information, the more comfortable people will be to buy with their phones. To that end, Retrevo cited services such as Amazon's PayPhrase, which lets customers create a unique phrase and a four-digit PIN to verify accounts and speed up online purchases.
Amazon last year also launched a mobile payments service for third-party developers and merchants that allows consumers to use their Amazon accounts to make purchases on other mobile sites or apps.
PayPal and other companies also provide mobile wallets, and some speculate that the major U.S. wireless carriers may eventually get into the payments game, as NTT DoCoMo has done in Japan -- but perhaps not until m-commerce becomes more widespread.
More than half (53%) of those surveyed by Retrevo said they hadn't made a mobile purchase to date and had no plans to. But another 27% said that though they hadn't bought anything yet via cell phone, they would eventually.
So currently, about half of mobile users are open to mobile shopping -- but only 20% have actually used their handset to buy goods. That still leaves room for plenty of room for growth for retailers and others looking to extend their business to mobile devices. Converting potential mobile shoppers into buyers will be the hard part, but an app offering some type of mobile wallet would appear to ease the process.
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When users are made to feel comfortable with an application, they trust it with their wallets. Amazon.com proved that in the late 1990s. The did an exemplary job of making people feel like they were purchasing from a company they can trust.
The same will hold true with phone commerce. Already people are comfortable with micropayments on their phone. When someone comes down to a solid user experience for mobile payments, the same windfall will follow.