Mobile E Commerce: Success Turned Viral

When e commerce presented fast paced online retailing solutions to small and large businesses, very few would have thought that m-commerce would receive so much encouragement in the form of mobile commerce. Mobile commerce applications were initially considered sidekicks to e-commerce centralized strategies of marketing. The boom in online trading through smart phones has removed all doubts about the future of mobile e commerce application.
Marketing analysts are now impressed by the numbers projected in cellular transactions and according to their theories; the future holds much better prospects in mobile e commerce application than for e-commerce itself. In the second half of 2010, a maximum percentage of mobile website visits were recorded by iPhone users which claimed a clean 37 percent of the total numbers. IPod Touch users recorded 29 percent, while Blackberry and Android recorded 13 percent and 12 percent respectively. While releasing these statistics, Digby predicted that retailers were going to consider phones as a "strategic fourth channel" in marketing to aid their online websites, in-store services, and cataloguing.
 Mobile commerce applications were slowly gaining popularity amongst business houses by 2000. The major breakthrough came when companies started realizing the immense return on investment enjoyed by mobile couponing. Phone coupons are links, tickets or coupons that are sent to the user's phone and need to be presented at the time of in store purchase. These coupons get the users the same benefits of discounts that paper coupons can get them.
Retailers found that redemption rates of mobile coupons exceeded 50 percent while paper coupons never yielded a redemption rate out of the range of 0.2 percent to 2 percent. Advertising campaigns started to include mobile tickets or coupons to increase the sale options of their various products. Results generated caused awe in the marketing fraternity and spoke loads about the immense success of mobile e commerce applications and its possibilities in future.
Why is cellular commerce so successful?
Marketing professionals realized that consumers were getting busier and preferred to make a choice of the products they wish to buy while on the move. A heavy turnout also resulted from location based services that included potential relevant messages sent to residents and users of a particular region. This helped in creating brand affinity in the minds of the users who became exceedingly aware of the options available in their regions.
Benefits shared with users based on their location serves as the ultimate motivation to compel them make a purchase of products from your business house. Mobile coupons offered the added advantage of security to the retailers as sharing of benefits is difficult in case of multiple users from the same region. Geocentric location based personalized services have popularized mobile commerce applications to the common folk.
As more and more individuals want to define their social profile using the most advanced mobile applications, location based services like Foursquare are the best tools for them to notify and share the locations they visit including details like time of arrival and departure schedules.