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Study: Shoppers don't think m-commerce is secure

February 27, 2012

Only a limited number of shoppers are using mobile technologies to buy their goods, despite ongoing investments in a multi-channel approach from retailers, according to research released from Shoppercentric, an independent agency specializing in shopper research.

The report, "Shopping in a Multichannel World," highlights how only 13 percent of consumers used their smartphones to purchase goods in the past month, and only 7 percent used a tablet.

According to Shoppercentric, 45 percent of all consumers now own a smartphone, and 14 percent own a tablet.

Consumers with smartphones cited a number of reasons as to why they choose to shop in store, rather than through a mobile application or site; 51 percent said they could not experience products effectively, 46 per cent blamed poor network coverage and only 29 percent felt it was secure.

Retailers should invest in ensuring customers that mobile applications can be secure, so they feel as confident shopping on their smartphones as they do on the Internet, Danielle Pinnington, managing director at Shoppercentric, said in a company press release.

"It's the idea of sharing information about yourself that could be used for other purposes that raises a question mark in people's minds about how secure these access points are," Pinnington said "They are feeling pretty comfortable with online now, as they know when they pay for things they will get security questions coming through."

The Shoppercentric research also highlights that although mobile shopping amongst consumers is low, shopping online is popular, with 55 percent of respondents indicating that they had used this channel in the past month.

This indicates that although in-store shopping is still the most popular, consumers are looking to other channels, and Pinnington argues that retailers need to integrate the management of these channels to ensure success.

"Our data shows that a huge amount of overlap between channels exists - shoppers don't assign individual roles to individual channels," she said. "Shoppers don't want them as separate teams, they want them as one seamless team working for them. They just want to approach that team from different angles."

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