Paytm wallet has simplified Shekhar's life. He tops the wallet with Rs 1,500 and uses it to recharge his own mobile and two other numbers in his family. Sometimes, he gets a call or two from his colleagues too asking for a small recharge of their mobiles. Besides, he has discovered new ways to pay for small household chores. New uses for wallets are evolving. Various players are recognising this and are adapting to the changing environment.

Avis Car Rental is going mobile in a bigger and better way. The company has just rolled out an updated Android application that lets customers make, confirm or cancel car rental reservations via voice. As a result, Avis is making history in mobile tech among companies in its industry.

A redesign of Apple.com that went live today removed the standalone ‘Store’ tab, and the ‘store.apple.com’ domain entirely. This is an enormous change for one of the biggest online retail stores in the world. The buying experience is now woven into the site as a whole, with purchasing buttons and options for products available on every product page. Instead of browsing for information about a product and then having to make the ‘jump’ over to the store side, customers will now take care of both actions at once.

The man who built brick-and-mortar stores is back at it again. On Wednesday, former Apple executive and J.C. Penney chief Ron Johnson and his new online retailing company Enjoy Technology announced that they had secured $50 million in a round of funding led by Highland Capital. The company did not disclose its valuation following the round, only noting that it had raised about $80 million to date.

Crowdsourced logistics company Deliv is expanding into nine new markets with a 100 city reach as it looks to meet growing consumer demand for instant gratification with mobile purchases from major retailers such as Macy’s. Deliv now boasts one of the largest same-day delivery platforms in the United States, offering more opportunities for major retailers to team up with its services and provide their customers with the ability of purchasing items on mobile and receiving them hours later. 

Three weeks ago, all the 5,000 employees of Snapdeal, one of the big four diversified e-commerce companies in India, were asked to drop everything and experiment with its two-year-old app. They checked for bugs, tested ease of use, noted the time to complete transactions and compared the features with those of rival apps. It was a concerted effort aimed at suggesting ways to improve the shopping experience on the app, which would go on for three hours, and result in an avalanche of feedback. A thousand engineers then worked 24 hours non-stop to overhaul the app — the first major upgrade …

The installed base for mobile point-of-sale is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 32 percent as the technology extends its reach into businesses, big and small, across a variety of industries and geographies, according to a new report from 451 Research. At this rate, the research firm forecasts there will be 54.03 million installed mPOS units by 2019, up from 13.3 million units today.

Victoria’s Secret has added a gaming feature into its application for the Pink Nation loyalty program to promote sales for back-to-school wear among college students, leveraging the pull that mobile entertainment can have on consumers. The apparel brand is attempting to attract more school-bound consumers to use its app through a college football-based game.

E-commerce continues to grow in importance to QVC. The TV, web and mobile web retailer says U.S. e-commerce sales totaled $655 million in the second quarter, accounting for 47% of total U.S. revenue for the division of Liberty Interactive Corp. A year earlier, web sales accounted for 43% of U.S. sales, the company says. Of those web sales, 47.6% of orders were placed from mobile devices, up from 37.48% a year earlier. Measured globally, mobile accounted for 49.37% of QVC web orders during the quarter, up from 39.86% a year earlier. While up year over year, mobile as a percentage of …

Consumers in South Korea will spend nearly $15 billion this year on retail purchases via mobile device, eMarketer estimates. That amounts to 37.5% of retail ecommerce sales and 4.2% of total retail sales in the country, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast of retail sales around the world. Mobile commerce is growing far faster than sales on digital as a whole or retail as a whole—26.5% this year, vs. 11.0% growth in retail ecommerce and 1.8% growth in total retail sales. - See more at: http://www.emarketer.com/article.aspx?R=1012821&RewroteTitle=1#sthash.A1xONR7x.dpuf