11 Mobile Commerce Trends To Out Look For In 2021

December 14th, 2018 | Updated on April 12th, 2021

For some time now, the online industry, despite still being in its infancy, has undergone a transformative change. A large part of this transformation stems from the development of hugely impressive mobile commerce solutions.

While just a decade ago most of our shopping was still done offline, today most of the noughties predictions of eCommerce dominance have come true. However, for much of the early years from 2010-2013, we were repeatedly told that smartphones were going to change everything.

It appears to have been, much like the eCommerce boom, a wise prediction. What, though, are some of the biggest mobile commerce trends expected to live up to expectation as we head into 2019?

1. More And More

Part of the reason for the exceptional growth of the internet has been the development of the availability of mobile internet. In the past, to use the internet you needed a fully operational PC with working equipment. You would also need to have made an investment in an expensive monthly internet contract, often tied to a TV deal and/or landline.

With a smartphone, though, that is not the case. Instead, you can connect everyone to a very powerful solution for a fraction of the monthly cost using data plans and Wi-Fi connections to supplement internet connectivity.

Indeed, by the end of 2018 it is estimated that we will have over 3.2 active internet users. Estimates put this at around 55% of the global populace. Even more impressively, though, is the fact that out of that 3.2bn around 2bn of them will gain access to the internet using a mobile device.

The reason why mobile commerce is going to keep increasing is quite simple: it’s so accessible that it would seem almost strange not to continue.

2. Location, Location

Another important change that we expect to see take place this year is the rising growth of proximity-based marketing. Using this solution, businesses will be able to far more readily target the areas they wish to look at and target, using Bluetooth signals to help send a mobile marketing signal directly to people who are nearby your local store.

It’s great for making sure we can easily connect with and more readily speak to nearby customers, and it’s becoming bigger than ever.

2. Further Growth

Even more impressively, that number is expected to grow by 25% every single year. Year-on-year, more people will move from using a PC or laptop and instead into a more mobile, automated kind of system. It’s expected that for the next five years, we will see a 25% increase in mobile device internet users year on year.

That is a huge prediction, but it just goes to show the immense confidence that so many have in the mobile commerce industry. It’s going to leave a lasting impact on the world, with the rapid rate of growth almost guaranteeing mobile commerce as a long-lasting form of trading.

4. Shopping Tags

Another major eCommerce change aimed at mobile will see the use of the popular shopping tags feature become commonplace. This new solution will for people to use shopping ads and tags to help promote their products to people on social media – it’s a very useful tool, and is likely to become hugely popular across the online industry.

From targeting mobile customers to making it easy to snare new customers with shopping tags, this is certain to become a well-respected part of mCommerce in 2019.

5. Faster Checkouts

With mobile commerce comes that innate desire for speed, ease of use and a lack of irritation when making a purchase. One-click checkouts are becoming commonplace, with most people finding it easier to make the impulse purchase when it takes seconds, not minutes. These secure, safe solutions make it easy for people to make their purchase with one press of a button.

Simple? Yes, very. Effective? Like you wouldn’t believe. This is almost certain to transform the industry and looks set to be rolled out with regularity in 2019.

6. Faster loading speeds

The other major trend we notice coming into regular usage and parlance is that of loading page speeds. Mobile devices need to be faster, and it’s becoming a trend for companies to take the page of their site loading so much better.

It’s all about making sure that people are encouraged to hang around. With so many new options and competition out there, people won’t give your site very long at all to load up. This new trend shows that people are doing something about it, so expected super-optimized page loading speeds to be a major trend in 2019 across mobile commerce.

7. Online, All The Time

Another reason why mobile commerce is expected to continue this immense upward trend is the number of people who are using it on a daily basis. At the moment, it’s expected that around 87 hours per month is spent by people on a mobile device. That’s a lot of time, and dwarves the 34 hours per month average that is met by those on a laptop or desktop device.

The days of people spending all day camped at the PC are long gone. Why confine yourself to a keyboard and mouse, when you could do all of your shopping as you go without a single issue?
Make no mistake, people are online all the time. Expect this number to grow, too, as the online world begins to change and adjust to meet with changing of usage of the internet.

8. A Sales Gap

At the moment, in 2018, just over one third – 34% – of all eCommerce sales hail from a mobile device. This means that more people than ever make those big purchases and life decisions based on their phones around one-third of the time.

As impressive as that sounds, though, it’s also very important to note that the sales gap is likely to keep growing. By 2021, its’ expected that we can see around a 20% increase on that number, to around 54%. In 2019, then, expect to see a lot more sales coming from this industry, with the potential for a jump of as much as 10% being predicted.

Make no mistake: this is a transformative moment for the eCommerce industry. Slowing down such a movement will, to many, feel like wishful thinking. That sales gap is soon to be turned on its head from a significant minority to a majority.

9. Smarter Choices On The Go

Indeed, it’s expected that 2019 will continue the trend of allowing our mobile commerce choices to be decided by our phones themselves. It’s estimated that around one third of all our purchase decisions are now made by finding information online. The reviews of other users and the extra information new can find online, not least finding the product for a better price, all play a critical role in transforming the way that you manage your money.

Smarter choices made using more data available to our fingers on the go, then, appears to be the method of choice when it comes to personal progress. This is not likely to change, either, so you should not expect a huge shift in the direction of people going back to making less impulsive choices: 2019 will see us use our phones more than ever, especially for decision making.

10. Exceptional Growth

Indeed, all of the factors we have just mentioned and brought up are an immense undertaking. By the end of 2018, the eCommerce industry will be worth around $2.86 trillion. By the end of 2019, that is expected to have grown to as much as $3.418 trillion.

Given that mobile commerce is making up around $700bn of that figure in 2017, expect that number to keep growing. Indeed, from 2013-2017, mobile commerce grew a whopping 300%. 2019 is expected to see that continue, with a transformative impact on the way that we operate when making a purchase.

If you are someone who can see the value of mobile commerce, the number above should help you to convince others. Some see the mobile commerce boom as being a negative thing, removing the personal impact from making a face-to-face purchase. With the facts and figures showing the exceptional growth of the industry, though, arguing for such a regression to old ways of commerce might seem fanciful at best.

In short, expect 2019 to continue along the same themes of the transformative impact that mobile commerce is having. Signal boosters have created the below infographic titled “The Future Of M-Commerce” which provides a detailed look into how big this medium is set to become.

11. Chatbots

One of a trend that has shaped a previous year and definitely is going to influence the year 2017 is the increasing popularity of chat bots. Chatbots is a program that simulates a real conversation with users by using artificial intelligence.

To understand this technology and find use cases that will fit your business and your customers` needs, let’s analyze the background that drives this trend.

Factors Influencing The Rise Of Chatbots

1. The exploding popularity of messaging apps is hard to deny. The GlobalWebIndex Statistics says that 75% of Internet users are adopters of one or few messengers. Also, take a look at the Business Insider statistics that shows how quickly growth the popularity of messengers.

2. The rise of artificial intelligence technologies brings chatbots to a new level. Together with natural language processing AI brings up to 90% to an accuracy of machine parsing and understanding of requests. Another significant factor here is sophistication notifications that take into account the context of the situation and are always on across devices.

3. The accelerated development of all kinds of sensors and wearables in addition to analytics and data science boosted the personalization of virtual communication and the capabilities of predictive assistance.

4. Payment integration to third parties via APIs brings, even more, options to the chat bot functionality.
Adopting Chatbots for business
There is one interesting nuance you probably haven’t ever realized. In app stores, you can find millions of different apps available. However, the Forrester Research shows us, that users use about 24 apps per month wherein the 80 per cent of the time is on just five apps. That means that you hardly can shoot ahead with a new app for your business, but you still have high chances to integrate your chatbot into one of the platforms from your user’s everyday routine.

Chatbot app development has all chances to be one of the hottest trends and a new challenge for companies and software vendors.