The Influence of Mobile Phones in Shopping

Smartphones, the biggest innovation of the 21^st century have lifted the shopping world to the new height. The number of mobile internet users are increasing rapidly is the reason behind the rise in mobile shopping. The mobile phones have brought a new category of mobile alone internet users which was absent in desktop shopping. From a survey we found that social media are the highest accessing sites from mobile phones which are followed by traffic to online shopping sites.The demand for smartphones will bring more smartphones for shopping in the future which means the mobile traffic to the sites will increase more than desktop sites which are right now 30%. In that case the sites which allows flawless browsing and shopping through mobile phones will be in the centre of people.

The rise in mobile internet users

Desktop sales are sharing the major part in online sales but the predictions by experts tells another story, the mobile shopping which is in its beginning phase will outdo the performance of desktop very soon, most probably before 2018. The predictions are well backed by the surge in mobile phone demand across the globe. Its statistics is the best proof which reveals that the world currently have more than 6.8 billion mobile connections however, the number of people using mobile phones are not the same as the number of mobile connections. Among 6.8 billion phones more than 3 billion phones are smartphones with internet connection and mobile applications which shows that 40% people are having internet accessing mobiles. Also, last two quarter smartphone shipping enables the analysts to forecast that the smartphone will outnumber the world population by 2018.So by the end of 2018 almost 90% of the people will be connected by internet ultimately it will increase the mobile shopping users.

Problems to be solved

The shift from desktop shopping to mobile shopping pressurised the retailers since the rate of cart abandonment increased after the rise in mobile shopping. More than 70% customers are leaving the site if they experience any technical issue in the site. Mobile shopping is growing at double digit which was 13% in 2013 reached 30% by the end of 2014. In such a demanding situation, the retailers have to respond the demand otherwise the customer base will shrink. But the retail industry managed the issue by introducing separate websites for mobile phones. Later, the responsive web designs replaced the separate websites for mobile phones and separate websites for desktops. After the advent of responsive websites, the cart abandonment rate due to inefficient websites dropped down completely but the other forms are still persisting. Among the other issues high shipping cost is the major one; some of the price sensitive people are abandoning the cart if they felt it has higher shipping cost. Therefore, many coupon providing sites including www.discountrue.com provides more free shipping codes than other discount codes. Cyber security is still the major concern but many people pinned their hope on scientific developments for a better future.Online shopping and offline shopping are entirely different from each other and they are not competing with each other. The competition is among the online shopping sites, in such a case sites which offer seamless mobile shopping will able to continue their business in future.