Adults in the United Kingdom use their mobile devices for research but use computers to buy.
As a result of m-commerce security concerns, adults in the United Kingdom are still using their mobile devices to research products, but when it comes to making the actual purchase, they are still opting to use their desktops and laptops to buy the items that they choose.
This is the case among one quarter of adults in the U.K., as they have yet to trust mobile.
The study was conducted on behalf of BSS Digital. The research, itself, was performed by an online marketing research company called Opinium. It has been estimated that over 40 percent of the adults in the country have a smartphone and/or a tablet. However, the study showed that very few of those device carriers actually use those devices to purchase a product or service online.
Instead, one in four consumers will use m-commerce for researching a product to make a shopping decision.
Those consumers will then keep their choice in mind and then go to their desktop computers, instead of using m-commerce channels, to actually buy the item or the service that they found with their smartphones and tablets.
According to a BSS Digital client services director, James Southgate, “From the time it takes a customer to look at their potential purchase on their handset and then later log on to a PC and purchase it – they could easily have stumbled upon your competitor. That’s a sale lost.” Southgate went on to explain that this is what makes it important for both the desktop version of the site and the mobile version to have a consistent style and feel.
The functionalities of the two sites – ecommerce and m-commerce – need to have comparable functionalities. This will allow a consumer to use a mobile device to research products, and then comfortably head to a PC site, find the item once more, and make a payment within a small number of clicks. The easier this transfer can be, the more it will encourage sales. This will continue to be the case until U.K. adults feel more confident with security over mobile.
