Buying Online Just Got Easier, Dangerously Easy
With all of the hype that the new iPhone received at the grand unveiling in San Francisco this week, one feature seemed to allude the scope of the general audience. While the uproar about the headphone jack and the buzz about the additional camera enveloped the country like the San Francisco fog in July, the most important feature in my eyes wasn’t a physical change, it was the update to Apple Pay. But what makes this so important in a world where few people I know consistently use Apple Pay? You can use it online now! Whaaaat!?
I know, I’m stoked too! While Amazon long dominated the simple checkout process with their introduction of “one-click” checkout a few years back, they have been killing the game of eCommerce. But look for things to change now that the ease of checking out at the supermarkets has become available from your couch. I think we can all relate that buying from a website, aside from Amazon, is a nuisance when you have to manually input your credit card information, requiring you to stand up and walk to you your wallet when all you want to is keep your fat-ass planted in that Lazy-Boy. No but seriously, as more and more payments are processed through mobile devices, the ability to checkout with Apply Pay will drive more business through your smartphone.
“The data clearly shows that Smartphone add-to-cart and conversion rates are much lower than for desktop” — SmartInsights.com
Right now, there is an inherent discomfort with buying products online through a mobile device. But one reason why consumers might be hesitant to buy online is because of the added resistance that they feel when they have to manually input their information on a small screen. Manually inputting this data isn’t necessarily easy on any device but the availability for simple transactions is much less on a smartphone than it is a desktop. To add to this, I believe that the current fact about how much time consumers spend searching for products in mobile browsers versus the time spent in applications will begin to slowly even out. Right now, almost all of time users spend on their mobile devices is within applications. Because research is still best done on a desktop computer. There is more room to discover information on a screen that is 1ox the size. But that doesn’t take into consideration the fact that mobile is now king. Google revealed last year that mobile search has surpassed desktop, and that is only going to grow.
As a result, eCommerce is going to become more important than it ever has, especially on mobile, with the ability to turn any online retailer into a one-touch-purchase store. Impulse purchases are going to sky-rocket, to a dangerous level, with the elimination of step-by-step checkout processes that give the consumer a reason to think twice about that maybe slightly unnecessary purchase. So for everyone who loves to shop online, beware, your bank account is starting to look nervous.
