PayPal Unveils Local Mobile Shopping Stats and New Solutions
PayPal Unveils Local Mobile Shopping Stats and New Solutions
There's a great deal of money and opportunity in the mobile commerce landscape, according to a study conducted by PayPal in 2011 for online and mobile shopping insights. In Singapore itself, the market has grown more than 660 per cent from S$43 million in 2010 to S$328 million (S$244 million via smartphones; S$82 million via tablets) in 2011, with a projected growth of ten-fold to S$3.1 billion in 2015. Mobile shopping stands at nearly a quarter (23%) of all online shopping last year, with a sharp increase in median spend per head from S$93 in 2010 to S$354 in 2011. With the high exponential growth in Android and iOS mobile device users, it is no wonder that 880,792 Singaporeans made a purchase through a mobile device in 2011, compared to 364,390 in the previous year. These shoppers spend an average of S$274 per head on smartphones and S$380 per head on tablets.
Even with the positive outlook, their study also found a number of barriers that could be improved to enhance local users' shopping experience and the top three aspects are as captured in this slide:-
To help facilitate a healthier mobile commerce climate, PayPal has identified two main barriers to mobile shopping, namely: security concerns and lack of user-friendliness. The former is already implemented in its existing layers of transaction security and Buyer Protection Policy. By introducing two fuss-free mobile commerce solutions, "PayPal Mobile Payments Standard" and the "Mobile Commerce in a Box", PayPal hopes to make the shopping experience as mobile-optimized as possible for users as well as streamline the merchants' back-end process.
The "PayPal Mobile Payments Standard" solution automatically provides vendors with a mobile-optimized payment page layout for users purchasing via their iOS and Android devices. This will be automatically integrated into the merchant's webpage if they already have PayPal support on their website.
The "Mobile Commerce in a Box" solution allows businesses to convert their online stores into a mobile friendly interface - in under an hour and without additional charges. The idea is to create a better shopping experience to encourage increased purchases (according to PayPal, Google data has shown that 3 out of 4 Singaporean businesses do not have mobile-friendly websites). As a result, these sites will have larger product photos, buttons, links and text. This will be rolled out later in the year but you can start registering your interest here: https://www.paypal-apac.com/minabox/.