Need to Know 2022 mCommerce Insights for Fashion Retailers

Smartphones are everywhere and inescapable; mobile devices are even more so.

6.64 billion people are smartphone users today, which makes up 83.72% of the world’s population. 7.26 billion people are mobile phone users, meaning 91.54% of the world owns a cell phone. With the overwhelming global majority being mobile phone users, many of whom often have their phone on their person at all times, businesses are presented with a lucrative opportunity they need to take advantage of.

Retail mCommerce sales via a smartphone are only exponentially increasing, projected to reach $418.9 billion by 2024. More customers are discovering that they can use their mobile devices to easily browse and shop from anywhere, enabling businesses to feed into their buyers’ impulses and increase their number of on-the-spot purchases.

As more retailers adopt a mCommerce business model, competitors need to adapt and plan accordingly. If this is an area your business is currently looking to expand, here are some mobile shopping trends and strategies you need to know about mCommerce in 2022.

What is mCommerce?

mCommerce, or mobile commerce, involves the use of any handheld mobile device, from a phone to a tablet, to conduct commercial transactions online. Transactions would include browsing and purchasing products, investing or conducting online banking, and paying bills. Making any sort of purchase anytime, anywhere is mCommerce if you’re relying on a cell signal and data plan.

mCommerce is projected to become the future of shopping. Research shows that customers are responding well to mobile shopping trends, particularly convenience and streamlined technological advances that speed up transactions even more. According to Oberlo, almost 3 out of every 4 dollars spent on online purchases is spent using a mobile device. There is no doubt that mobile commerce is here to stay as a popular method of online shopping for customers.

Updated mCommerce Trends

Trends that businesses need to pay attention to when it comes to mCommerce include social media, voice-activated shopping, and mobile wallets.

Data from App Inventiv showed that 55% of those shopping on their smartphones purchased a product after seeing it on a social media platform. Many social media platforms, namely Instagram and Facebook, have online marketplaces built-in into their apps to allow users to follow merchants and purchase products instantly.

A growing number of smartphones have some sort of voice-controlled assistants, such as Siri. Voice shopping is gaining popularity as these assistants gain new, advanced features. In 2018, voice shopping was a $2 billion industry, a number estimated to reach $40 billion in 2022— that’s 1900% growth! When moving into mCommerce, it is essential to consider the capabilities of voice assistants.

The mobile wallet industry is another industry projected for high growth: up to $3.5 trillion^[1]

in earnings by 2023 to be specific. Customers are more likely to use and reuse a mobile-friendly website that will remember and store their payment information. By storing and filling out these details automatically, businesses can create a significantly better end-user experience.

Also Read: Optimising Digital Experience With The Best DXP

How Retailers can optimize the mobile-first experience

A downside to the mCommerce world, however, is that you will be up against a lot of competition. Businesses need to ensure their products are showcased effectively or else they risk losing customers and sales. Retailers must avoid this by optimizing the mobile-first experience to retain their customers. Thankfully, there are options businesses can look into to establish efficient workflows and maintain positive shopping experiences.

Retailers need to have their pages load quickly and make them easy to navigate for customers. A survey from IMPACT found that 61% of mobile users will not return to a website that isn’t mobile optimized.

mCommerce consumers are often in a rush, easily distracted by things around them such as phone notifications and other apps vying for the user’s attention. As a result, retailers need to capture them immediately and produce instantaneous results for success. To do so, retailers must check their websites are free of any lag, bugs, or difficulties in navigation. They must consider how their website looks and operates on every possible mobile device to create a pleasant, user-optimized experience.

Tagging product attributes and offering various category filters can help create this smoother shopping experience as these features allow customers to take control and filter out what they aren’t interested in and only focus on what they want.

While these tips can optimize the customer’s mCommerce experience, they require proper implementation, which can take a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, with the help of visual AI solutions created by developers like OMNIOUS.AI, businesses can streamline their optimization process to drive sales stress-free.

OMNIOUS LENS Camera Search observes and analyzes product photos uploaded directly into an eCommerce store’s search engine, and, from there, automates potential product matches from product metadata and customer behavior data to display similar items to consumers.

This tool helps provide additional options to customers and can reduce loss of sales when a product is out of stock, generating positive mCommerce results for businesses. These hyper-personalized recommendation algorithms are beneficial to customers and help guide their product discovery process.

2022 mCommerce Tips for Success

1. Use mobile visual search

By using mobile visual search tools like the OMNIOUS LENS Camera Search, retailers can optimize the results a customer sees to increase mobile traffic and sales. Visual searches guide customers to make purchases by accurately displaying the items consumers are looking for, along with related items they may be interested in.

This image recognition software helps consumers to use their time productively by browsing through product recommendations based on what they are interested in, rather than a random assortment of suggested items. This also helps customers to make more impulse purchases.

2. Refine smartphone shopping cart features

The features of a retailer’s online shopping cart can make or break a customer’s final transaction. Cart abandonment is a big issue with mCommerce. Therefore, it is crucial to have customers return to the site to purchase their saved items.

Online retailers must save and transfer the product information and data within their customer’s online shopping carts so that customers can revisit and purchase these items at a later time, using any mobile device. Whether or not the customer is on a different device than the one they started the transaction with should not matter. Customers should still be able to access the same information regardless. The cart is the gateway for a customer’s order and the rest of the retailer’s catalog. Retailers need to manage their customers so that they can find everything conveniently in one place.

By refining the shopping cart features, a business can simplify a customer’s check-out experience and remove any roadblocks or inconveniences that would otherwise make them abandon their cart.

3. Improve personalization based on mobile data

Customers who browse and purchase products through their phones produce valuable data. Retailers need to make use of this data to create tailored shopping experiences, something customers value and appreciate. As consumers browse, retailers should be collecting information and insights on the customers’ browsing/shopping habits, product preferences, engagement, and purchase history.

Learning and storing this data will inform future shopping experiences with each specific customer. Retailers should not have to wait until customers choose to return to them; they should be proactive and send targeted advertisements to customers that will inspire future shopping experiences. Observing customers’ shopping behavior also helps businesses determine the latest trends and what products or services are working the best. 

Also Read: Creating An Effective Digital Retail CX Strategy 

4. Update your smartphone recommendation engine

When consumers are searching for a product or brand, they rely on product recommendations to save time and energy. As a customer is browsing on their smartphone, they expect a list of similar or complementary items to appear.

It is so important to constantly update the smartphone recommendation engine to produce the latest and most relevant results. This will always be what customers are looking for and are most interested in.

Based on a given customer’s preferences, browsing history, and previous purchases, all information the retailer should have been paying close attention to, retailers can tailor the search results accordingly based on the customer’s taste. Specific tools, like OMNIOUS Visual Recommendations, does this automatically for retailers.

Utilizing personalization tools such as these will help get your products to target consumers, right in the palm of their hands.

Are you ready to start improving your business’s mobile commerce results today? Click here to access the latest on product tagging automation, visual recommendations, and camera search tools for online retailers.

^[1] OMNIOUS.AI Data