A report from a benchmarking company in the United Kingdom shows £7.5 billion in sales.
According to the results of 2012 as reported by IMRG Capgenmini Quarterly Benchmarking, from the United Kingdom, m-commerce sales broke the £7.5 billion mark.
To many, this has signaled the true beginning of the mainstream use of this channel by consumers.
The internet trade organization reported that in 2012, m-commerce sales made up 12 percent of the overall online shopping revenue in the United Kingdom. This was a massive increase over 2011, when that same figure was only 4 percent. At the same time, it did report that not all of the news was as positive as it could have been in that channel.
The m-commerce report indicated that there was a “considerable slowdown” near the end of the year.
This massive m-commerce reduction near the end of 2012 was seen both in visits to websites from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, as well as in the sales themselves. In fact, the numbers during that time did not reach the predictions that had been made at the midpoint of the year, when the popularity of smartphone shopping was reaching an explosive point.
From the first to the fourth quarter, m-commerce sales did still manage to see a near doubling, from having represented 8.2 percent of overall sales that occurred online in the first quarter, to representing 15.4 percent during the last. That being said, the indicators at the halfway point in the year suggested that the revenues would come to reach 20 percent of overall online sales by the last quarter. Clearly, the performance fell far short of that prediction, despite its considerable growth.
Chris Webster, the vice president of consumer products and retail at Capgemini, said that “We have seen a clear division in the mobile channels, with shoppers four times more likely to purchase an item on a tablet device over a smartphone.”
He also went on to explain this m-commerce trend by stating that “The slowdown suggests there is an issue with the customer experience retailers are offering. If retailers are to reinvigorate the level of adoption, they must recognize the difference in the mobile channels and build specific customer experiences for the smartphone.”
