High mobile penetration & social media drives Online shopping

With a rise in the number of web stores, customers are more inclined to make purchases online. The major reason behind this higher favour can be attributed to high internet &mobile penetration. Now whether it’s the home or on the way, these consumers use their phones to browse, research, find deals & make purchases from these online retail shopping carts.

According to a report by e Marketer, US consumers alone will spend nearly $37.44 billion in 2013 on purchases made via smart phones or any mobile devices like tablets or laptops which is approx. 57% more than last year figures. As far as number of mobile shoppers are concerned, such high revenues denotes an approx. 23million more consumers for 2013 reaching the figure to 118 million. Such a figure also indicates a more mobile centric lifestyle even if shoppers don’t buy on mobile.

Of these 118 million mobile shoppers for the year 2013, approx. 72 million will make purchases through a mobile device. The new trend seen in the mobile shopping vertical is that consumers who were using a mobile device are more likely to spend more while in-store than those who did not use it. Moreover, consumers who were using their mobile device for product research were more likely to make a purchase from eCommerce shopping carts.

The real challenge which the marketers & online retailers are facing is how to engage customers &convert them to final sales. To tackle this issue, they are using different resources to make their presence feel. Making their website mobile compatible is definitely one of the ways to tackle such issues. In addition to this, online retailers are also adopting social networking media to increase their visibility.

Report by e Marketers states that, ‘As social media has gone mobile, more & more consumers are accessing their accounts via smart phones & tablets. Now, marketers are racing to catch up with consumers where they connect, employing a variety of strategies for outreach. The key opportunity to capitalize is that mobile users not only log in more frequently, but they also spend more time on social networking sites too’.

As devices integrate social media more deeply, for e.g., by making it easier to upload photos from a mobile phone to a social site, it reinforces the mobile-social virtuous circle, making it even stronger.

But even to realize this, marketers need to make their content accessible through all mobile devices. Moreover, they need to focus more on content they write as news feed for their social media promotions. Therefore, before adopting this mobile commerce strategy, there are certain points that need to be attended.

Online retailers need to generate news feed for their social media promotions. For this, they can focus on using more images than simple text as images are more self explanatory. Marketers can carefully craft the content that includes images, product price, availability & other related options. 

An important point to note is that while generating news feed for social media campaigns,  marketers  need to focus less on promotions tied to their brand page & more on the content.

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