Mobile shopping is beginning to replace Black Friday, AdAge reported this October, citing Google data. According to Google, 54 percent of shoppers this year plan to do their shopping on their smartphones during free moments while eating or commuting, and 52 percent plan to consult their smartphone before visiting a store.
Smartphone shopping has gone up 64 percent since last year and now constitutes 30 percent of all online purchases. Meanwhile in-store shopping over Thanksgiving fell 5 percent last year, and total in-store spending fell 11 percent.
These holiday shopping trends reflect a broader increase in smartphone shopping year-round. In 2015, mobile shopping accounts for 22 percent of digital commerce, according to Gartner. By 2017, this will rise to 50 percent. To keep up with today’s market, it’s essential for your enterprise to stay current with the latest mobile technology trends.
Responsive Web Design
Mobile devices come in an increasingly diverse array of screen sizes, from smartphones and tablets to phablets and smartwatches. To adapt to this diversity, e-commerce websites have adopted a responsive approach to web design, which detects user device and adjusts display scale accordingly.
Microsoft says enterprises that want to implement responsive design successfully should adopt a mobile-first approach which uses mobile screen size as a primary default and adjusts secondarily to other detected devices. In conjunction with this, enterprise web designers should use CSS3 Media Queries and HTML5 to design fluid content that adapts to device size.
Touch & Audio Engagement Features
Microsoft also recommends that responsive enterprise websites should include gesture support. Where traditional desktop design is based on mouse point-and-click user interaction, smartphone users rely increasingly on touch features. These include tapping, swiping, pinching, and now, pressure-sensitive 3D peek and pop options introduced with Apple’s latest iPhone 6s upgrade.
In addition to touch, many smartphone users interact with their devices using voice recognition software such as Apple’s Siri. Smartwatches with their small screen sizes also promote voice recognition command interfaces. Including audio support for your site will increase your visitor satisfaction.
Mobile Promotion
Promoting your company website to mobile audiences means distributing content that appeals to smartphone users. Effective mobile content marketing must emphasize video, which Cisco projects will account for 69 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2017. YouTube and Facebook are the most effective sites for distributing video content, VideoBlocks CEO Joel Holland says.
Twitter is another essential content channel for effective mobile marketing. While Twitter does not display video content as well as other sites, it is extremely effective for distributing short blog excerpts and other quotable text. For example, LifeLock’s Twitter feed features useful information, interesting facts and intriguing questions that highlight content from the company’s blog.
Mobile Payment Processing
Doing business effectively with mobile customers increasingly means accepting mobile payments. Sixty-nine percent of global mobile consumers used their devices for banking activity in 2014, and 66 percent used them for some type of transaction, according to MEF’s most recent Global Money Survey.
In 2015, mobile payment processing has continued to grow with the increasing competition between providers such as Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay. Companies that market to mobile users should make it easy for customers to make payments using these services.
Security
The growth of mobile payment processing has naturally raised consumer security concerns and raised the bar for enterprise security standards. If you’re going to accept mobile payments and process other sensitive data, your customers need to have confidence that you can protect their information.
Technology writer Ed Tittel gives a roundup of enterprise mobile security best practices. These include using anti-malware, securing mobile communications through measures such as virtual private networks and encryption, using strong authentication and password controls and managing access to third-party software. Visa has published security guidelines for companies accepting mobile payments.
