Online Shopping Goes Mobile
October 10th, 2007 Posted in NewsNow online shopping goes mobile. With steady increase of people turning to the Internet to do their shopping comes another innovation from mobile service provider Sprint Nextel Corporation. Developed in collaboration with mShopper.com, Mobile Shopper is a mobile portal intended to enable shoppers to purchase seven million products from 30 reputable and popular online retailers including Wal-Mart, shoes.com and bluefly.com.
Using the wireless broadband infrastructure of one of the most popular and largest telecommunications company in the United States today, users can access and use Mobile Shopper without having to pay for extra subscription fees. This first feature of this kind in the US will result in a big opportunity for Sprint to increase its data usage as well as expand its user base. Unlike other existing mobile Internet services offered by hand-held mobile companies, Mobile Shopper will simply earn from the Internet fees that are charged on mobile online users while revenues from online advertising will help maintain the mobile shopping features.
Mobile Shopper is set to revolutionize mainstream online shopping by enabling customers to shop for virtually anything from clothing to appliances by using their hand-held mobile phones. Aside from an attempt to boost its revenues, mobile online shopping hopes to widen the mobile phone user base by pushing them to use their cellular phones for data services such as Internet surfing and video and music downloads. Online shopping has long been a mainstay in the World Wide Web however mobile commerce has yet to push the slow adoption of online shopping into Web-surfing using mobile phones.
With faster wireless data speeds and better user friendly handsets could help expand the mobile shopping market using a mobile commerce adaptation of mainstream online shopping. Internet marketing analyst Alan Goode of Jupiter Research believes that with the launching of Mobile Shopper, the market for mobile online shopping in North America alone could reach $505 million by 2008 and increase to $1.9 million in 2010.
By encouraging customers to use their mobile phones for uses other than talking, mobile industry revenues are likely to increase exponentially considering the convenience and ease that it is set to provide as compared to mainstream online shopping with people becoming more comfortable shopping using their mobile phones. This will also increase the investments that online advertisers will make in the mobile industry.
When using Mobile Shopper, users can conveniently search for a particular product at the lowest price or browse for products by retailer or category. Once the particular product is selected, customers can email product details to themselves for future reference, forward it to a friend or buy the product directly using their cellular phone.
To make mobile online shopping even more convenient, customers can create a Mobile Shopper account using their mobile phone or on a computer by clicking on www.sprint.com/mobileshopper where they will be asked to provide their shipping address as well as credit card information with a secure PIN. Using their Mobile Shopper account, users can easily make a purchase by simply selecting a product and entering their phone number and PIN without having to key in account information. Purchases made through Mobile Shopper will be reflected on the customer’s credit cart statement similar to online purchases made through the Internet.
