The Retail Advertising, Marketing and Promotions Blog

The Retail Advertising, Marketing
and Promotions (AMP) Blog

Providing retail advertisers and marketers
with the knowledge they need to succeed

Back to Main Page
About Universal Ad

The Universal Ad team is composed of experts in the field of Retail Advertising & Promotions. Our On Demand Promotions (ODP) software suite fully automates the planning, management and production of their promotional advertising.

The ODP Suite enables retailers and their service providers, such as ad agencies, printers and wholesalers to reduce costs by more than 50% and cut production time by up to 90%, while maintaining full creative freedom (no templates!)
To contact us with any question or request, please email us at info@universal-ad.com.
Subscribe Via Email

Blog Entry
Syndicate
Retail Blogs
Search the AMP Blog

Search the AMP Blog

Search only in titles:

Keyword:

Search in:

Date Range:

Advanced Search
Basic Search
The AMP Archives
Comment Showcase
- What people are saying

The Retail Advertising, Marketing and Promotions Blog: More Users Buying via Cell Phones

More Users Buying via Cell Phones

Posted by Universal Ad at Thursday, July 10, 2008 8:34 AM and is filed under Mobile

A couple of studies about m-commerce have recently been published. First, Nielsen Mobile (covered in Chief Marketer and Promo) reports that:

More than 9 million U.S. mobile subscribers (3.6% of the total) used their mobile phones to make a purchase of some kind in Q1 2008.
About 50% of those who surf the Web over their handsets expect to use them to buy goods or services in the future.
Men are slightly more likely to have pursued mobile commerce than women (4.5% vs 3%).
The 25-34 age segment is the most active - 5.4% vs 4.5% of those 13-17, 3.6% of the 18-24 group, and 3% of those 35-54.
The 13-17 age group is the most active in using text messaging to buy - 3.7% vs 2.5% of total subscribers and 3% in the 18-24 and 25-34 groups.
Barriers include security worries (41%), airtime/data charges (23%) and lack of trust in the completion of mobile transactions (21%).

The Chief Marketer article also provides some case studies. Moosejaw Mountaineering, for example, has seen a positive response to the mobile channel. It both allows customers to purchase via their smartphones and uses text messaging to foster loyalty (for one text message, they got a 51% response rate!) 1-800-Flowers.com created a younger group of buyers by allowing Facebook and MySpace users to send virtual flowers to their friends' phones.

A recent Gartner report (covered in Information Week and eMarketer) shows that currently twice as many US consumers are likely to check item prices by mobile compared with those who said they would buy items from their mobile phone (24% vs 12%). Other popular activities include finding stores and receiving promotions (20%). The report also showed that younger consumers are more likely to use the mobile phone to conduct retail activities.

The report's bottom-line: "retailers planning to enter the area of mobile commerce should differentiate themselves by offering multichannel capabilities, such as the ability to order by phone and pick up the item at the store or to save a mobile-phone-created shopping session so it can be continued on a Web browser on a home PC. Also, because the survey points to a shopping preference, retailers should strive to have listings available on portals, price comparison engines and mobile maps."

Posted by Universal Ad