Last week, eBay launched a motor app amidst the smartphone sales boom, with car buyers starting to spend users spending tens of thousands of pounds on motors on the move. Richard Anson, Founder of Reevoo, the social commerce solutions provider, takes a closer look at what this means for the automotive and smartphone sectors.
The news that eBay has launched a dedicated motoring app in response to consumers increasingly accessing its virtual market place to bid on big ticket items via their smartphones, is an interesting development in mobile shopping.
Since the development of mobile commerce, be it from the mobile web or from dedicated apps, there have been concerns about users not trusting this channel as much as other channels, such as shopping from a laptop or desktop.
However, the news that thousands of pounds are regularly being spent on purchasing cars via a smartphone shows that these concerns may not be as significant as previously thought. The eBay brand clearly garners such trust from consumers that they are willing to buy expensive items on their mobile, where they have been unwilling to do in the past.
For retailers and brands that are not as trusted with online and mobile shopping as eBay and Paypal (eBay’s wholly-owned payment service that has become a universally respected medium for online payments), using a trusted third party as endorsement can increase consumer trust.
When encouraging consumers to part with their cash on mobile, this trust is even more important than from a computer – and it can be achieved with something as simple as ratings and reviews from other buyers. Our data from May 2012 shows that 137% more users accessed retailers’ sites via mobiles than in the previous year.
With this sort of growth in the m-commerce space, retailers must ensure their mobile offering gives consumers confidence and trust in the product, the consumer service and the payments process – and user-generated content collected from a third party is an easy but powerful ingredient.
* All data from “Reevoo Insight, 2012”.
By Richard Anson
Founder
Reevoo
www.reevoo.com