In the world that we live in today, we all rely on our smartphones in order to conduct our daily activities. It doesn’t matter if you want to buy tickets for a concert, order something to eat, or you simply want to search something on a browser, you will do it by using your mobile phone. And basically, this is how the concept of m-commerce (mobile commerce) became reality, with the power of delivering electronic commerce capabilities directly into the consumer’s hand.
In this article, we’ll discuss how m-commerce managed to quickly gain ground more than ever before in the United Kingdom, in the past few years.
Statistics
Before going into detail about this subject, we’ll list a few global statistics about mobile commerce, just to give you an idea of how fast is the growth of this process of buying and selling goods anytime and anywhere you have access to the internet:
- M-commerce is responsible for more than half of all internet traffic.
- More than 62% of smartphone owners have bought something online in the past 6 months.
- Globally, m-commerce sales increased by 40.3% in 2017.
- By 2020, more than 80% of the people who own an online store, will provide their clients with a mobile version of their website.
Now, let’s see a few stats from the United Kingdom:
- The number of UK citizens who are also smartphone users is projected to increase to 53.96 million by 2022, a number that will definitely play an important role in the evolution of m-commerce.
- Mcommerce sales account for 43.3% of all UK retail ecommerce sales.
- By 2021, the number mentioned above will grow to 51.7%.
The situation in the UK
M-commerce has taken the world by storm, and the UK is definitely no exception. Actually, in 2017, the number of purchases made via smartphones overtook the number of purchases made via tablets. That being said, it is more than obvious that people have a tendency (especially in the past few years), to conduct their buying and selling activities while using their mobile devices. It’s an exciting time to be a mobile commerce retailer, and you can definitely succeed, especially if you have a good business plan and use the right tools. The rise of m-commerce, along with the startup accelerators that help them get off the ground, has given the much-needed boost to UK economy now that it needs it the most, especially with uncertainty regarding the Brexit.
And the future is brighter than ever in the m-commerce world. Last year in the UK, more than 43% of the e-commerce sales were actually m-commerce sales. Well, this year, that number is expected to increase to 45%. With all these predictions being mentioned, it’s safe to say that the UK m-commerce will soon be worth 48.6 billion euros.
The Rapid Progress of M-commerce
One reason why m-commerce is taking over is pretty obvious: technology is changing and advancing every day of our lives. And the way it’s advancing, makes it very easy for us to do everything with a few taps on the screens of our smartphones, shopping included. A huge increase in the number of people who shop on their mobile devices was really obvious when virtual assistants such as Cortana came out. This is pretty self-explanatory given the fact that Artificial Intelligence technologies are taking over every industry in the world.
There are also other reasons why m-commerce has grown so fast, one of them being the progress of mobile commerce transactions, such as mobile payment.
But maybe the main reason for what is happening in the mobile commerce world is the way we are living our lives at the moment. Everybody is always in a rush, we never have time to pay our bills, to do our shopping, to get groceries or to get new clothes. It became a normal thing for us to be able to buy almost anything with a few screen taps.
When we’re looking at all these numbers, it is pretty obvious that mobile devices, especially smartphones, are becoming our personal assistants who we turn to when we need help with anything. You have to try and keep up at all times and always come up with new methods that can help your business, like taking advantage of the benefits of inventory management software. Things are pretty clear nowadays for retail business owners: if you don’t offer services that are accessible on a mobile device, you will definitely lose the majority of your potential customers. M-commerce is fastly rising all around the globe, and the United Kingdom is definitely one of its main scenes.