2012, why you need an m-commerce strategy

Recently Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) conducted a study with over 500 clients to find out what the upcoming trends and assumptions are for mobile in 2012.

Of the 500 clients surveyed nearly a quarter of them believed that m-commerce and mobile marketing would be the main areas for expansion this year.

62% of the retailers also agreed m-commerce would be essential to their business strategy.

It’s becoming pretty clear that online retailers are now starting to realise the importance of increasing their focus on mobile rather than desktop. However, there is still a lot of improvement needed.

Making a mobile website is the first step. Making an m-commerce site is the next.

I only started shopping online on my mobile this year. This isn’t because I preferred using a desktop browser to do my online shopping but because I owned a ….wait for it…. blackberry. Don’t get me started on the internet browsing on that phone, but now I have an ‘actual’ android smartphone.

I haven’t seen many m-commerce sites as usually I either get the mobile site (which has no e-commerce functionality) or the main e-commerce site. It gets annoying after a while having to zoom in and out to buy a product.

What online retailers need to focus on now is not only perfecting their e-commerce structure but also their m-commerce structure. The mobile site checkout can’t just simply replicate the e-commerce site by just changing the screen dimensions. It needs to be made much simpler, as less is more on mobile.