According to a report by Dr Windsor Holden, Research Director at Juniper Research, mobile payments will reach $707 billion by 2018. The projection which includes mobile handsets and tablets represent 30% of all eRetail by that time, an increase by 50% compared to last year. The report - Mobile Payment for Digital & Physical Goods: Opportunities & Forecast 2014-2018, states that the retailers were increasingly developing strategies built around mobile, using it as a ‘hub’ facilitating payment, enabling product discovery and customer retention, which correlates with the strong increase in size and scale of purchases across both smartphones and tablets. The report also highlighted the increasing trend towards ‘showrooming’, where consumers examine retailer products in-store while simultaneously browsing on their mobiles to compare prices online.
According to report author Dr Windsor Holden, ‘This means that not only is the retailer proactively offering the consumer the opportunity to price check in-store, but that the purchase can be made immediately, without having to queue elsewhere in the store.’ However, the report cautioned that while retailers were increasingly optimizing their sites for mobile handsets, only a small minority had done so for tablets. Read More - Mobile Retail Purchases to Exceed $700bn Annually by 2018, Juniper Research Finds