How mobile marketing is going to save m-commerce

According to a study out this month by Affiliate Window, which studies on a monthly basis its traffic figures, retail sales through mobile have slowed their rate of growth for the first month since, well, selling stuff through mobile started to get on analysts radar. Does this mean that the m-retail bubble has burst? Not really. What it shows is, I think, two forces at work.

First up, I think the general parlous state of the economy, the fear surrounding all our financial futures from our chums in the Eurozone and a slight drop off in hype around m-commerce are all playing a part. But perhaps more interestingly, it seems that what consumers are doing with ‘mobile’ is shifting their shopping habits from the mobile phone to tablets.

If you drill down into Affiliate Window’s figures you find that the iPad has increased its share of sales week on week. In week 20 it accounted for 53% of mobile sales, by week 23 this had grown a massive 11% to 64% of all mobile sales. The rise in sales through the iPad has seen the share of sales through both the iPhone and Android devices decrease significantly over this period. The iPhone dropped from 29.61% in week 20 to 22.90% in week 23. During the same period Android dropped from 13.2% to 9.7%

And despite the drop in the share of sales through mobile handsets, the actual volume of sales through each device increased (apart from Blackbery – sorry kids).

But, while this shake up – if you can call a drop in growth from 7.85% from 7.32% in a month a shake up rather than a blip – may worry some, Affiliate Window finds that conversion rates on mobile of any stripe is growing, hitting more than three per cent for the first time since February.

So mobile shoppers are slightly more likely to actually follow through and buy than they were. And this is, in itself, encouraging for the sector and its raft of technology and service providers. Those that do shop on these devices are buyers.

And the figures don’t take into account how many end up doing research on mobile then buying through another channel, such as in-store or online and vice versa.

One thing that all this does point to is that retailers need to continue to take mobile more seriously and to look at how mobile can be used as a marketing tool. A separate study out this week by Velti, which asked 3000 consumers about being marketed to via mobile, finds that 45% are happy for it to happen, but are likely to only let three companies do it to them. This figure rises to 55% (but still wanting a maximum of three brands to contact them through mobile) when you look at trusted brands.

And top of the list of trusted brands are retailers (25.6%), financial services firms (16.9%) and travel companies (16.5%) who are all well positioned to be a ‘trusted’ brand and exploit the mobile opportunity.

This study shows that early adopters of mobile marketing are likely to be the ones that get the cake and that retailers are ideally positioned to be amongst these companies privileged enough to talk direct to consumers via mobile.

These two studies show that retailers need to do more to engage consumers to shop through mobile and their trusted brand status lends them to it exquisitely well.

Has Apple ruled out mobile payments?

The release of iOS 6 for iPhones and iPads has been greeted with the usual fanboy hysteria usually reserved for the Dear Leaders of North Korea – wailing, wild applause, tears… fear – but within it is something that could well set Apple up in role of gatekeeper to m-commerce, m-loyalty and m-payments.

Passbook is a native app that is built into the OS and is designed to take all the user’s boarding passes, tickets, store card apps, loyalty cards and eventually payments cards, wallets and so on and organises them into a single place.

The initial services it offers are around ticketing and loyalty cards and it cleverly uses the GPS to locate you and pop your ticket, boarding pass or loyalty card onto the phone’s lock screen when you are the place you need to use them.

While the app is not a full mobile payments system, like Google Wallet, as it doesn’t store credit card or bank account details, it is a step in the direction of mobile redemption behaviour and might prove to be a smart road to easing consumers past concerns over mobile payment services.

What it does do is position Apple’s OS in line to be the catch-all needed to make the burgeoning world of loyalty and ticketing on mobile simple to use and manage. But will the company ever add payments to this?

One of the biggest bugbear’s with making m-commerce work properly, is that as it becomes more widely spread and apps that help you do it proliferate, managing it all becomes a nightmare.

Mobile payments is heading in this direction as I type. There are now so many different ways to pay, that it presents a massively confused picture to users and merchants alike. I have, because its my job, downloaded many mobile wallets, loyalty cards and ticketing apps and already it is becoming very hard to manage. Much as the early days of trying to download and manage music was 10 or more years ago.

What Apple’s Passbook does is create a single point of entry and control for the user of many of the things that the phone can be used for out there in m-commerce land. And it also looks, possibly, like Apple setting up yet another throttle on a service sector, just has iTunes has done on music, movies and TV shows and Newsstand has done for publishing. Is Apple poised to turn Passbook into the tool for managing payments? Will it integrate it with iTunes and make it a fully fledged payment tool?

The jury’s out on that, but it is very surprising that Apple hasn’t made any foray into mobile payments with the launch of iOS 6. Everyone was expecting something and everyone still thinks NFC will feature in iPhone 5, but I am now not so sure.

Were mobile payments – in the sense of using your phone to pay for things in shops – a real goer, then Apple would be on board with something clever. The fact that the company isn’t makes me start to think that maybe, just maybe, mobile payments isn’t ready to go yet – and may never be.

Consumer opinion – as I have opined here before – is not really behind it, and despite a raft of launches around it over the past few months, no one is really doing mobile payments. Everyone seems happy with cards and phone being very separate. Perhaps we have a solution for a problem that doesn’t yet exist?

What does the age of convenience have in store?

With the Euro 2012 football championships in full swing, it is hardly surprising that sport – particularly the beautiful game – is dominating the telemedia news this week.

O2 Media has found that 79% of sports fans use mobile as their first port of call for keeping up to date with scores, fixtures and team news around the championships and, perhaps unsurprisingly, its mostly men who do it.

What is perhaps surprising is that 73% of these football mad men will be also using their devices to text and call friends while the games are on to talk tactics and share their highs and lows, as well as wading in with their armchair manager input on Twitter and Facebook.

While much attention is focused on how mobile can be used to create in-game betting opportunities and high level apps abound to do everything from watch different camera angles to ordering a pizza while playing a football game, good old texting appears to still be one of the key areas of engagement for fans with each other.

As has been said many times in Telemedia-news, despite all the tech, text is still king. And this is an opportunity that is woefully overlooked by many in the wider mobile industry.

This news is compounded by a study by telco billing company MACH, which has found that more than a third of smartphone users are opting to pay for apps and services within apps – sporting or otherwise – using direct operator billing.

The reason why, despite everything else available that fans are texting and app users are using direct operator billing? Simple: convenience.

And this is something that needs to be capitalized on. The more convenient it is to do something the more likely people will do it. Which means more revenues – even if payouts are higher.

This convenience factor – as well as price issues – is borne out by Orca’s YouGov-conducted poll of consumers who suggest that 08 numbers as a means to contact are damaging brands as the cost of calling them from mobiles in particular, but also landlines, is at best opaque. Orca, naturally, is championing voice short codes as a way around this – much as the wider industry is trying to push Payforit4 for on-bill payments – but there is something in what is being proposed. Even the staid old BBC has used voice short codes to enable mobile voting on its flagship Saturday night talent show The Voice. A ringing endorsement indeed. If that wasn’t enough, Big Brother over on Channel 5 is also now offering voice short code voting too, through Spoke (formerly Telecom Express).

Again, voice short codes play into the need for convenience. Not just that they are short and easy, but the fact that you know what they are going to cost you is itself a convenience.

What all this means is that, after a decade of development of new billing tools, new ways of creating interactivity and in trying to create ways to do in-app billing, the old ways are in fact being looked at by consumers as being the easiest.

So why isn’t more being done to make these things part of the mainstream fabric of the mobile ecosystem? You never hear Apple talk about voice short codes or Payforit4. You never see banks or app developers talking up these tools for purchasing things. Even with retailers bemoaning the fact that one of the biggest limiting factors to getting mobile retail working in store is a lack of a general and easy to use payment mechanism, operators are very slow to react.

But as the MACH, Orca and O2 Media surveys show, consumers are starting to vote with their fingers and seek out the easiest and best ways to do things and woe-be-tied those that don’t start to embrace this groundswell.