Christmas shopping season sees notable increase in mobile payments from barcodes

Mobile payments throughout the holiday shopping season broke a number of important records according to many large retail chains.

Many have reported that the heart of the reason that so many people started using their mobile devices to make purchases was because of the increasing use of barcode scanners that allow them to rapidly make price comparisons online so that they could find the least expensive offer, and buy it right away.

John Lewis, a large retail store chain in the United Kingdom, has reported that the number of visits to its online clearance sale that originate from mobile devices has jumped by almost 120 percent when compared to the levels from the same time last year. It also stated that there has been a 46 percent rise in the amount of money spent using smartphones since the sale began on Christmas Eve at 5pm.

Many are hoping that this might be a true indicator that consumers are starting to look to their mobile devices as a device that can be used for purchase opportunity investigations such as finding product details and comparing prices, and then they use the device as the natural next step of actually making the purchase.

Many major retailers are now offering barcode scanners as an element of their mobile apps. These include those from eBay, Amazon, John Lewis, and several others, so that they can encourage barcode-based price comparisons with mobile devices.

In fact, Amazon has taken this concept a step further by allowing consumers to simply snap a picture of an item with a barcode on a store shelf to be able to compare its price with that offered at Amazon.com.