M-commerce has never been tried by 15 percent of Millennial device owners

M-Commerce A Shaky Start

Among the barriers to shopping on smartphones is the struggle with typing on a tiny screen.

Even though the Millennial generation is typically considered to be tremendously mobile-savvy, a recent study has shown that a full 15 percent of them have never conducted any m-commerce shopping activities at all on their smartphones.

Also revealed was that 34 percent of that generation find it challenging to use a small screen to type.

In this study, which was conducted by the Ampersand ecommerce agency, but commissioned by YouGov online, it was shown that within that 15 percent of mobile device owning 18-34 year olds, 15 percent hadn’t conducted any kind of m-commerce activities at all on their smartphones. This didn’t just include making a purchase, but it also involved using the devices for shopping lists, researching the items, saving products for future purchases on another device, looking up store hours, locations, or inventories, or browsing a retail website, among other things.

While retailers are placing a very large focus on m-commerce optimization, there are still barriers in the way.

M-Commerce A Shaky StartWhile it remains important that retailers focus on mobile commerce, this research does provide interesting insight into the types of struggles that will need to be overcome in order to make the smartphone based shopping experience more appealing – particularly to those device owners who are most likely to use their gadgets all the time and for a broader range of functions.

What the research found was that retailers still have a long way to go before there is a more universally appealing mobile shopping experience available to consumers. At the top of the list is making sure that shoppers of all ages will be able to use the websites over mobile devices with greater ease and convenience.

One of the primary issues identified by the study was that 48 percent of retail sites don’t offer image zoom on product pages. Considering the size of a smartphone screen, that can make it virtually impossible to see product details in pictures. Moreover, about half of all retailers don’t offer numerical keyboards in order to make it simpler to input payment information, making the checkout process frustrating to the point that it is prohibitive to many consumers.

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