Mobile Experience Disappoints. Will Social Take Over?

Users are frustrated with their mobile shopping experience this holiday season, and social commerce could be next year’s fastest rising star. Those are the key takeaways from several new research reports, according to Mobile Commerce Daily.

A Mobiquity study found that 33 percent of consumers want to be able to pay with their mobile phone but only 24 percent say they can do so today, while 39 percent think retailers should provide the same look or feel across devices and channels but only 22 percent say that’s true now.

Consumers’ top complaints include slow mobile times (42 percent), inconsistent user experience (37 percent) and not enough mobile-accessible information (26 percent). Only 16 percent gave mobile retailers an “A” grade, while 54 percent said retailers just met (or inconsistently met) expectations when it came to mobile commerce.

Meanwhile, e-commerce platform vendor MarketLive’s holiday shopping data highlights the impact of social. So far this season, MarketLive merchants with the 15 highest sales figures, attributed to social media, achieved average social media revenue gains of 212.31 percent and average social traffic gains of 210.12 percent, year over year. That’s compared with an average of 135.7 percent for social revenue and 113.1 percent for social traffic from all MarketLive merchants. Some sites among the Top 15 are seeing 20 percent of their traffic and 10 percent of their revenues originating from social media.

“While mobile is a huge story this holiday season, social is also making a splash,” said MarketLive CEO Ken Burke. “Consumers are making purchases as a result of social interactions.”

“Particularly during the holidays, retailers are in competition with hundreds of other brands and offers,” added Eric Karofsky, Mobiquity’s director, vertical practice lead. “Next year, we expect to see more seamless relationship building with consumers on social and retailers looking to not only react to customers, but surprise them in a positive way.”