Research conducted at the Internet Retailing Conference in London on 4 October by payment processing experts WorldPay finds that customer demand is driving online retailers towards offering m-commerce transactions, and plans are in place to implement in the next one to two years.
The research, carried out with 109 senior managers at the conference, reveals that at present only 29% of businesses currently offer m-commerce solutions for customer payments. However, across the 71% of respondents that do not currently offer m-commerce, 80% revealed plans to add mobile offerings in the next 24 months, and a further 14% of respondents indicated they were likely to roll out this channel in the next three or four years.
60% of those polled felt that the greatest driver for offering m-commerce stemmed from customer expectation of being able to complete transactions across mobile devices. 10% of respondents said they would only be likely to extend their platforms to m-commerce in order to ‘keep up’ with competitors, while a further 11% said they would upgrade because modern technology makes mobile transactions possible.
Respondents also identified a range of challenges to the successful adoption of m-commerce solutions. 28% of those surveyed believe that technological capability is the biggest barrier, whilst 18% felt that data security was. 8% thought the risk of fraud was a concern, and 15% and 13% respectively perceived the cost of processing the payment and the overall payment process as the biggest challenges.
Gabriel Hopkins, Head of eCommerce Products at WorldPay, explains: “M-commerce has long been spoken about but is now becoming a reality through technological advances and customer demand. It is encouraging to see that merchants have plans in place to implement m-commerce capability in the very near future. The technology available now makes this possible and merchants will need to look at ways to improve their online and mobile shopping experience for consumers to ensure these channels reach their full potential.”
