The explosive growth of smartphone proliferation is fueling a boom in the mcommerce market for solution developers who can master the game of improving user experience and security for shoppers, as well as customer engagement metrics and the ability to leverage data for retailers. With over four and a half billion people using a smartphone last year according to eMarketer research, as over a billion devices were shipped running Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Android and nearly 200 million were shipped running Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS 8, the rush is officially on in the m-commerce market to capture this rapidly growing traffic and channel it towards retail.
Overall, the global smartphone market was up roughly 30% last year alone to around 1.3 billion, with roughly 1.75 billion total users and eMarketer forecasts smartphone penetration climbing further in coming years, rising to just under 70% of the global population by 2017 as screen sizes grow and 3G/4G networks advance. The Chinese equivalent of ecommerce powerhouse Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alibaba (NYSE:BABA), is certainly banking on the growing trend towards m-commerce, having recently plunked down a $590 million investment in Chinese consumer electronics giant, Meizu Technology, one of the top ten smartphone manufacturers in the country.
A smart move considering the fact that Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa are now increasingly seen as choice target markets for new initial smartphone user growth and YoY growth rates in mcommerce went supernova last year. M-commerce smashed a string of several quarters of YoY growth in the 20% range last year, according to industry analysis by comScore, which reported Q2 2014 mcommerce growth of 47%, crushing discretionary retail’s 3% growth and the 10% growth seen in softening desktop ecommerce.
This white-hot market is where wide-area wireless transaction software solutions developer, Mobile Lads (OTC: MOBO), is making its play, with an increasingly sophisticated portfolio of technologies and properties that cater to the evolving mcommerce space. Grounded in their overall market approach by bedrock technologies like the real-time mobile transaction security service, xmVerify, and the automated, volume-based billing solution, xmBilling – MOBO is turning heads with the xmOne mobile product offering in particular, which is designed to be a top choice for colleges and universities for flex-dollar account top-up and ID card purchasing.
The patented xmOne platform is a standalone and highly secure mobile phone service environment that allows transaction authorization and processing, as well as prepaid account top-up and ancillary services, such as balance verification, or account notifications and alerts, all from the convenience of the user’s mobile device. This innovative solution leapfrogs existing limitations of top-up solutions in use at campuses all over the world, bypassing security pitfalls like web access via unsecured public computers, or costly and logistically inefficient automatic deposit machine solutions, and antiquated campus card offices.
Mobile Lads has recently gone even further down this road towards m-commerce transformation of the economy via a key joint venture agreement with Domark International (OTC: DOMK), to buy up and take control of the North American rights to their online shopping platform, including SimbaDeals.com (http://simbadeals.com). Simba Deals is a leading global shopping community based on Domark’s platform technology, which offers the best deals on a variety of top brands in fashion, beauty and lifestyle, as well as deals on electronics, home and garden, books and media, sports, toys and games, grocery and gourmet, baby and kids, and even ticket or experience products.
The Monetizer101 platform, which has been operating in Europe for some time with great success, fuses a variety of core market players, like retailers and media owners, as well as consumers, into a single online discount shopping network. Because the system is designed to reward media owners for driving traffic to the retailers and retailers are able to sign up for no cost, while only paying commissions on traffic-generated sales, the site represents a symbiotic relationship between these three elements. Consumers can get great deals on their favorite brands while supporting the media they enjoy and retailers can offload discounted inventory they haven’t been able to move as readily through traditional channels, while also promoting their online offerings via a single high-traffic location.
Mobile Lads has taken another step down this road as well with their development and launch of a quick-list coupon site designed to make digital coupons easily discoverable by consumers. CouBox, which is built on the Google App Engine, is designed around the consumer experience modality and gives the customer all the power, allowing them to grab what they want, unlike other/similar platforms that simply shove promoted content at the consumer. Moreover, CouBox is a coupon aggregator, populating its system with a huge variety of choices as a service to the customer, making it a one-stop-shop for deals that collects coupon items from entities like Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) and RetailMeNot (NASDAQ:SALE). The CouBox system can even issue users auto alerts via mobile at their behest, notifying them of select deals as they become available.
CouBox dovetails exceptionally well with the Simba Deals architecture and Mobile Lads is fast becoming a technology and services dynamo in the burgeoning mcommerce world. The company is clearly setting itself up to take advantage of the growing trend among value-conscious consumers, who are increasingly using their smartphones to shop or conduct transactions.
Get more info on Mobile Lads by visiting www.mobilelads.com
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