New research indicates that a surprisingly large number of small businesses do not have plans to optimize their website for mobile in the near future. While it may not be expected, this certainly indicates an area of opportunity for savvy small businesses that are embracing the trends and building mobile web sites for their business.
TransFirst and ControlScan’s new report titled “Small Merchants and Mobile Payments: 2013 Survey on Technology Awareness and Adoption”, indicates that almost half (49 percent) of ecommerce merchants are aware that their websites are not optimized for mobile environments and that 17 percent didn’t know whether or not their websites are optimized for mobile or not.
This is where the opportunity comes in. While consumers have embraced mobile and the use of the mobile web, we see that just 31 percent of multi-channel businesses have a mobile web site for their business. Unexpectedly, only 37 percent of small businesses are either in the process of creating mobile web sites (15 percent) or plan to create a mobile web site in the next year (22 percent). The rest have no plans to take advantage of this rapidly growing market. 21 percent are ‘somewhat interested’ in mobile optimization and plan to maybe do something within the next couple years, 29 percent have no plans to optimize in the foreseeable future and the final 13 percent are unsure.
“Business owners who aren’t planning on creating a mobile optimized web site need to get there” said Kimber Johnson, managing director at Vanity Point. “Small businesses need to embrace these trends and guide their business towards growth and increased revenue.”
Clearly mobile optimized web sites offer huge opportunities since consumers have been so quick to embrace their use and small businesses have struggled to adopt them. Businesses willing to give the customers what they want will reap the rewards.
In a recent study by International Data Corporation, they conclude that number of smartphones to be sold around the globe in 2013 will surpass the sales of basic feature phones. The massive growth of these devices highlights the need for businesses to have a solid plan for mobile application development (on both of the major platforms, businesses can’t ignore either iPhone applications or Android applications) and a mobile web site.
Sales of smartphones will increase 32.7 percent for this year over 2012, with forecasts from the International Data Corporation, predicting 958.8 million units to be shipped, compared with 722.5 million units in 2012. The decline in smartphone prices is believed to have been a major factor driving growth. In 2011, the average smartphone price was $443, by 2012 that number dropped to $407 and in 2013 it is predicted to finish at about $372. In the future it is expected that prices will drop even further and by 2017, the average smartphone price is forecast to drop to $309.
International Data Corporation predicts that smartphones will account for 52.2 percent of all mobile phone shipments by the end of 2013. Ramon Llamas, a research manager at IDC, even was willing to describe 2013 as a “watershed year for smartphones.” An interesting trend is that nearly two-thirds of all smartphones bought in the world in 2013 will be purchased by people in developing countries, says the IDC, whereas this number was just 43% in 2010. This is assumed to be driven by price reduction as well. “Smartphones have become increasingly common in emerging markets and it is often the first affordable means of computing for these markets,” said Ryan Reith, IDC program manager. “These are markets where average personal income is far less than in developed markets, and therefore vendors have been forced to create smartphone computing experiences for the low end of the market.”
Clearly businesses must address the shift occurring the market and look at the demographics of their target market. Mobile applications and web sites are increasingly important with each new year as we see smartphones continue to proliferate the market.
Back in 2010, sales attributed to mobile activity accounted for just 0.4 percent of e-commerce retails sales in the UK, but in just 3 years that figure has literally exploded, with mobile commerce now accounting for 20 percent of e-commerce purchases. This translates into a 5,000 percent increase (based on research by IMRG and Capgemini). “In 2020 when we look back on the last ten years, we will undoubtedly see it as the ‘mobile decade’. In the first three years alone we have seen sales via mobile devices increase from nearly zero, to over 20% of all e-retail sales. However, we are only scratching the surface and over the next few years we will see the technology reveal its full potential,” says Chris Webster, VP, Head of Retail Consulting and Technology at Capgemini.
E-commerce sales in the UK attributed to mobile surged past 20 percent in the first quarter of this year and are bound to keep right on growing with the prevalence of mobile devices, mobile applications, mobile web sites and the general shift of the populace to a mobile oriented society. Additionally we see that mobile traffic that goes to retail sites as a percent of total traffic has now reached 30 percent in the first quarter of 2013, up from 24 percent in the forth quarter of 2012. IMRG and Capgemini suggested that these rises in the first quarter are the result of a large increase in tablet ownership following Christmas.