Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ Category

By Dan Rowinski

Is the world ready for mobile payments? Not quite, according to a global survey released by MasterCard. There are a variety of factors that will lead to mobile payments adoption across the planet, from infrastructure deployment to consumer willingness to make payments with a mobile device. The mobile payments revolution hasn’t arrived just yet, but if MasterCard can be believed, we are not far away.

MasterCard released its Mobile Payments Readiness Index (MPRI) to gauge the readiness of 34 countries across the globe for mobile payments. MasterCard defines mobile payments in three different categories: peer-to-peer, mobile commerce (mCommerce) and at the point of sale (POS).

Will using your mobile phone to make payments soon be as commonplace as a debit card and PIN?

Those in the know claim we are just years away from widespread acceptance. And it could be apps that drive the uptake rather than near field communication, the so far favoured technology.

A survey by accountancy firm KPMG found that 72% of business leaders believed that mobile payments are already reasonably important or will be in the near future, with 58% saying that they have already developed a mobile payments strategy, wrote Holly Jones on inspireme.co.uk. “Most respondents expected mobile payments to see ‘mass-market acceptance’ within the next two years,” she said.

With news that Hewlett-Packard plans to sell devises that make wireless payments, and Google’s expectation that such a system is will soon gain mass appeal, near field communication (NFC) looks set to finally hit the big time. Or does it?

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expects NFC to be in daily use within a year. He said: “The software is available now. How long does it take an infrastructure player to upgrade a significant percentage of their infrastructure – it’s in the order of a year.”

More than a third of specialist publishers in the UK are charging for online content, the InPublishing/Specialist Media Show survey has found.

Preliminary analysis of the cross industry research found that 34 per cent of publishers provide paywalled content now and 15 per cent plan to so so in the next two years.

The survey, carried out by eDigitalResearch, is backed by the PPA, InPublishing, University of Leicester and Wessenden Marketing. It questioned around 200 MDs, publishers and owners of consumer and B2B niche publishing companies with a turnover of under £10m, asking for their views on paid online content, live events, apps, digital editions, social media and print.

A digital marketing approach and its associated channels are critical for overcoming the declining effectiveness of mass marketing, according to Gartner, Inc. Although marketers have been using digital channels as part of their campaign management strategies for more than 10 years, most are using them for traditional push, mass-marketed, interruption-type execution of campaigns rather than a two-way engagement approach.

“Mass marketing is no longer a long-term strategy. Mass-marketing campaigns have a 2 percent response rate and are on the decline, whereas by 2015, digital strategies, such as social and mobile marketing, will influence at least 80 percent of consumers’ discretionary spending,” said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner. “Marketers still need to shift their traditional campaign management strategy around executing campaigns to a customer and move toward a digital marketing, two-way engagement approach.”