Last year’s Cyber Monday made even the biggest mobile sceptics reflect on the topic. Half of the visits to Online Stores and 28 per cent of transactions were done on mobile devices. If someone thinks that it was a one-time event, they should think again. According to eMarketer.com, 51.2 per cent of Americans older than 14 will make at least one purchase via smartphone in the next year. This is influenced not only by the constant availability of portable devices, but above all by appropriately optimised Online Store websites, which have enabled efficient browsing on lower resolution screens. From my observations, it follows that there will be increasingly more interest in mobile commerce (m-commerce) from users on domains outside of the US and Western Europe. We are seeing similar trends in our region, too. What does it mean for owners of e-shops? It’s not enough to just adapt your webpage to different screen resolutions. It’s also necessary to make the entire path to purchase easy to navigate even on the smallest displays. Trivial? If we consider that there are still many e-shops which aren’t even fulfilling the most basic demands of e-consumers, it turns out that this is still a challenge for many.

The future of hypermarkets in logistics

Let’s continue on the topic of smartphones, or more specifically – their users. The results of a study carried out by Accenture indicate that more than half of consumers expect real-time promotions. The study was conducted on a group of 10,096 people from all over the world who had shopped in both stationary and Online Stores in the last three months. Unfortunately, only seven per cent of sellers offered such promotions. Users know what they want and on which devices. I wrote about this in my last update: More and more users are willing to share their data if it means that they will get quantifiable benefits from it. This should interest managers of retail chains, because the future will be even more mobile. Younger users don’t know any other world than the one with mobile devices and the Internet, and they are used to being able to buy everything quickly online. Older users are also getting used to the benefits of online shopping. It can therefore be expected that in the future, hypermarkets will serve as logistics centres and retail warehouses, and shopping will take place mainly online. There is a growing space in the market for impulse purchases, which are easier to make by smartphones and in response to real-time promotions. As always, I am emphasizing the increasingly important role of logistics.

Twitter – show me the money

Much of today’s text is dominated by topics related to mobile devices, so it makes sense to close the circle with a topic related to an application which is used most often on smartphones. Twitter is going through some hard times. It’s not only that the firm just saw the departure of several key management figures and that investors are becoming increasingly impatient, saying ‘Show me the money!’, following Cuba Gooding Jr. in ‘Jerry Maguire.’ It’s that Twitter users themselves have been protesting proposed changes to the ranking algorithm under the hashtag #RIPTwitter. In the face of the crisis, CEO Jack Dorsey firmly denied the proposed changes, but not completely, which has added fuel to the fire. The example of Twitter proves how carefully you have to watch what you say and how difficult it can be to do business when every piece of information is available to the whole world in a matter of seconds. This is largely thanks to Twitter’s own service. If, however, this social media service closes up shop, it is not exclusively in response to the change in algorithm and the protests of users. It is also due to the lack of revenues, which has unsettled investors.