Mobile e-commerce has grown at such a fast rate that economists have given the specific brand of online shopping its own name: m-commerce. According to an article recently published by Forbes, m-commerce spending is projected to reach $284 billion by 2020 and account for nearly half of all e-commerce.
Because of this boom, however, m-commerce has encountered hardware and software limitations that can potentially break the shopping experience for consumers. As reported by Business Insider, in Q2 2015, U.S. adults spent 59 percent of their time on mobile devices but spent only 15 percent of their money there. The mobile conversion rate for U.S. citizens shopping on their smartphones in Q4 2016 was 1.55 percent as compared to 4.14 percent for desktops. Smaller screen sizes can make for a frustrating shopping experience, sometimes getting in the way of browsing or entering payment options. Many companies don’t have optimized websites for mobile viewing.
Conversion rates and time spent on a particular device don’t necessarily paint the entire picture though. According to comScore, items bought online are “weighted” differently depending on the means of purchase. For instance, 57 percent of items categorized as “Toys & Hobbies” are bought on a mobile device, and 89 percent of “Consumer Electronics” are bought on a desktop (as of Q1 2017).
Despite this division of the m-commerce market, consumers overwhelmingly prefer to use dedicated apps as opposed to using a browser on their mobile devices. According to Flurry Analytics, a mobile apps analytics tool owned by Yahoo!, 90 percent of the time a person spends on their phone is within apps. Companies like Amazon have taken the lead on m-commerce app development. Amazon revealed 72 percent of their customers shopped using a mobile device during the holiday season, a 56 percent growth worldwide. Amazon has taken into account the cramped nature of some smartphones by developing augmented reality features and allowing customers to shop via Alexa-based hardware.
To meet the growing demand of the m-commerce market, Dirxion offers custom app development for the Google Play and iTunes stores. Within the apps, customers are able to view a business’s online catalogs or download them for offline viewing. The catalogs, when accessed while the phone is online, are completely interactive and optimized with HTML5. Dirxion can also integrate online catalogs into an existing application. Such is the case for Dirxion customer Ulta Beauty, where eflyers published with Dirxion have been integrated into their shopping app to create a streamlined and seamless buying experience.
