Earlier this year, Google took steps that would see priority given to mobile websites when users are searching on their mobiles. It’s not surprising when you consider that the average person spends around 90 minutes a day on their phone, which amounts to 23 days dedicated exclusively to their mobile phone each year.

Get Mobile Right

There’s actually a significant amount of data analysing this trend and justifying Google’s decision. According to a recent Google report, when using their mobile phone nearly half of all consumers start their search for a new product on a search engine. Hence Google’s desire to offer them relevant and mobile-friendly pages.

When shopping, the start of the journey is now better optimised, but what’s being done to optimise the end of the journey – the purchase or transaction stage?

Data from the Monetate Q4 2014 Ecommerce Quarterly indicates that businesses are seeing the growth in mobile visitors, but not in the results. Smartphone add-to-cart and conversion rates are currently much lower than desktop.

Think Beyond Search

It would seem that for merchants, optimising their site so it can be searched or viewed across connected devices is an important part of the process. Yet optimising their site so consumers can purchase on mobile as easily as they can search seems to be an afterthought and as a result, merchants are seeing higher rates of checkout drop off and cart abandonment.

We are in a new era of frictionless spending and when a consumer decides they want to pay for something, they want to be able to pay for it easily and quickly - in one or two clicks.

A Mobile Consumer

As an example of this consumer behavior, imagine being on a train journey, and think about where you could have made a mobile payment transaction if a site had been optimised for making mobile payments. You could buy access to on-board Wifi, pay for one-off access to a newspaper, a book or to watch a film. Buy cinema or gig tickets. Top up a car-parking fee. You could even pay for the small premium required to push a personal sales advert to the top of a listing site.

These micro transactions might only be made on a mobile device, and in some cases can only be made on a mobile. When doing so, many consumers don’t have or don’t want to use credit cards for such small, infrequent transactions – nor would they want to be getting their credit card out while sat on the train or most public spaces.

When a consumer is on the move and engaging on a connected device the requirement for a site to be optimised for a quick and secure mobile transaction becomes even more important, as there is no alternative. The merchant’s choice is to make the mobile purchase convenient – or risk losing the customer.

A positive example of a seamless mobile payments is direct operator billing or Charge to Mobile as it’s also known, a technology that allows any UK mobile phone user to pay for digital goods and services with just a few taps on their phone.

Right now any consumer in the UK with a mobile phone can use Charge to Mobile without pre-registering, that’s 93 per cent of all UK adults. This, coupled with a frictionless two-click payment experience, makes it one of the most powerful mobile money solutions available.

 

By Paul Paterson, Commercial Director for ImpulsePay. 

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus