In today’s breakneck commerce race, you need every advantage you can get. One of the best ways to get, and stay, ahead of the competition is to understand the world of mobile, or M-commerce. M-Commerce uses handheld devices, typically that smartphone in your hand right now, to facilitate transactions between your company and your clients.
What used to be a specialty add-on to a more traditional e-commerce approach is quickly becoming an expected standard. You can spend all day browsing the best mobile eCommerce sites or you can read this quick and easy guide to mobile commerce retail.
Mobile Commerce Apps Provide Easy Access
Traditionally, one of the biggest limiting factors to the growth and stability of your business was access to your customers—and their access to your business. Before mobile technology, customers needed to spend time and money to get to your business. Customers who were too far away, too busy to stop in, or didn’t want to invest the effort would be likely to skip out. With
Mobile commerce the distance between you and your customers shrinks down to the space between them and their smartphones. Not only does this have the obvious advantage over brick and mortar shops, but it also means that your customers won’t even have to surf the web to find your business—it’s already on their mobile device! Even if the goal is to get in-store customers, mobile commerce apps can help drive those sales.
Staying Competitive
The m-commerce retail statistics show that use of mobile commerce apps is on the rise. What used to be a niche market reserved for the industry giants like Amazon is quickly becoming the status quo for everyone from small shops to industry leaders.
Fortunately, there are comparatively few smaller shops using mobile commerce. This means that the field is still open for small companies to take ground in the M-Commerce market. What this means for your business is simple. Getting into mobile commerce now is the best time to start. Not only will this give you the edge over the competition, but it will keep your innovating. Speaking of innovating, mobile commerce is a great way to break out of a marketing rut.
New Marketing Opportunities
Buying up traditional ad space on local television, billboards, and print media is a less safe bet than it used to be. It’s less likely that people will have access to these traditional media and more and more likely that they will have a smartphone or mobile device. Mobile commerce apps allow you to control when and how your ads are seen by your customers. You can schedule notifications when certain promotions will go live, and even who can see them. Imagine if that traditional television spot knew that the person watching was only interested in some of your lines or if they had been recently looking for something specific. That’s the kind of hyper-focused targeting you can achieve with M-Commerce.
Better than the Web
Mobile commerce apps are generally better than mobile websites when it comes to connecting your customers with your merchandise. We discussed earlier how traditional retail has some limitations that mobile commerce does not, but mobile commerce retail also has the edge on e-commerce. Commerce websites quickly fall out of date as web browsers and standards update. This isn’t even about their appearance which is much harder to control, but just the software that gets your page in front of your customers. Mobile commerce apps are much more stable than their website-based counterparts. Not only does this make them faster, but also more reliable to shop with your company. So much of keeping a business successful is finding new ways to cut out the middleman and moving from e-commerce to M-Commerce is no exception.
Keeping one step ahead of new trends is the reality of running a commercial business today. Mobile commerce apps offer a great way to help customers find and connect with your business. They also help keep you competitive. As the mobile market expands and the tech that keeps it together becomes both more affordable and more present M-Commerce is going to continue to grow. Being able to reach these potential customers is a marketing opportunity few can afford to miss. All this together means mobile commerce is increasingly becoming better than more traditional e-commerce. Keeping your business competitive today means expanding into mobile commerce before the competition does.
