What is Mobile Commerce?

Mobile commerce or M-Commerce is doing online business using mobile phones or other handheld devices. Mobile commerce comprises:

• Buying or selling physical or digital products

• Mobile banking and money transfers

• Bill payments, ticket booking etc. using mobile apps or mobile sites

• In-app payments through digital wallets

• Mobile coupons, marketing and loyalty programs

New-age mobile commerce also offers Edutech, Healthtech, Agritech, Fintech solutions through mobile apps or mobile websites. 

With more and more users being glued to their mobile devices mobile commerce has become the primary channel for doing digital business. 

How is Mobile Commerce different from Ecommerce?

Ecommerce means doing any kind of selling or buying activity online. This is done using a desktop or laptop computer. On the other hand, mobile commerce is a way of doing ecommerce through mobile devices. Basically, m-commerce is a sub-section of ecommerce wherein ecommerce activities are carried out through mobile devices.

M-commerce has gained a lot of traction in recent years as it offers greater mobility, ease of use and better access to customer data to the business owners.

What are the advantages of Mobile Commerce?

The growing internet penetration and widespread use of smartphones has made it possible for businesses to reach markets that were otherwise out of their reach. Also, customers now prefer to interact with a brand over multiple channels. Mobile commerce offers an opportunity for brands to do so. 

The benefits of mobile commerce are:

• Broaden your audience base by reaching to hinterland customers where mobile is the only means of ecommerce

• Quick purchase as your buyers have the flexibility to buy from anywhere, anytime

• Creates a multiple sales channels for your brand through mobile or PWA stores and mobile apps

• Helps in creating personalized, conversion oriented buyer journey with better insights into buyers’ in-app browsing patterns

• Use a variety of real time marketing tools like push notifications to engage buyers better

• Boost order volume and ticket size by leveraging impulse buying with targeted ads

• Easy to make your products sharable on different social platforms ( WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook etc.) used by mobile users throughout the day

• as orders can be completed anytime in a few clicks  

• Cost-effective and efficient marketing with higher marketing ROI 

What are the challenges of Mobile Commerce?

Ecommerce has rapidly gravitated towards mobile commerce with an average of 73% online orders coming via mobile devices. However, despite a lots of benefits m-commerce has its own set of challenges. 

Here are some of them:

• Keeping pace with rapid evolution and technology updates of mobile devices

• Building mobile commerce applications and sites that work even at low internet speeds

• Safety concerns about mobile apps access to different mobile data

• Building iOS and Android mobile apps and syncing different changes done on your ecommerce website

• Offering seamless buyer experience on different screen sizes and devices

All of these challenges can be mitigated by using an advanced mobile commerce solution provider.

What is the future of Mobile Commerce?

Global mobile commerce market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34% between 2021-2026 (Source: imarc). With mobile devices evolving virtually into our personal assistants, m-commerce is all set to go places. Be it B2B, D2C, online marketplaces, aggregator platforms or any other ecommerce business model, success of each one is driven by its mobile apps and mobile commerce strategies. Brands that successfully leverage mobile commerce have been able to disrupt the market.

StoreHippo is built grounds up on the mobile-first principle. It comes with an inbuilt mobile apps builder that builds Android and iOS apps for brands without any additional coding. Also, there are inbuilt apps for admin, vendors, delivery boys etc. All the stores powered by StoreHippo are PWAs, which means that when opened in any browser, these stores look and function like an app. Also, there icon can be added to the homescreen and these stores can be launched from homescreen just like native apps. StoreHippo mobile commerce platform has all the tools needed to helps ecommerce brands ace their m-commerce game.