Commentary

Innovations Sure To Spark Mobile Commerce Growth

What’s more exciting than the incredible growth of mobile commerce?

For sure, it’s the fact that we’re still in the early days of mcommerce innovation, and potentially game-changing developments now seem like a daily occurrence.

Take retailers’ enthusiasm for mobile wallets, which -- when combined with all sorts of promotions and discounts -- is going to make mobile purchasing an increasingly attractive proposition. Following the lead of Walmart, Target is reportedly developing its own mobile wallet for early next year.

Speaking of discounts, a number of platforms are working on ways to keep mobile shopping in the purchase funnel long after they’ve moved on to other business.

Pinterest, for example, will now let users know whenever a buyable Pin they’ve saved drops in price.

“Say you’ve collected a bunch of gift ideas on your Holiday Shopping board,” Wonjun Jeong, a Software Engineer at Pinterest, notes in a new blog post. “When that cashmere scarf for mom goes on sale, we’ll send you a notification so you can buy it right from the app.”

Presently, Pinterest users can choose from more than a million Pins with reduced prices, by Jeong's count.

Pinterest only recently started rolling out a “buy it” button on its pins on iPhone and iPad apps.

Not long after its launch, however, some analysts showed a lack of enthusiasm for Pinterest’s ecommerce effort. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru called the execution “weak” and “limited to what merchants have in inventory.”

Pinterest has promised that 60% of all product pics will be “buyable” in the near future, but Mulpuru said she was “highly skeptical of that figure.”

Regardless, it’s early days, as they say. The innovations will keep coming, and collectively contribute to an increasingly mobile marketplace.

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