The headline is a direct follow up to last week’s blog post, which concerned one merchant’s unfortunate overreaction to “showrooming,” that mobile-device enabled method of seeing a product “live” in a store, then turning to a handy screen to see if you can get it for a better price.
This week, financial news roundups are abuzz with a recent report by the Federal Reserve that nearly a third of all mobile phone users had used mobile banking in the 12-month period leading up to last November, when the Fed compiled its data (which means the trends have been growing in the half-year since).
Further, nearly half of all smartphone users — and remember, not all mobile phones are smartphones yet — did likewise, mostly using wireless banking services to review account balances, check transactions, and transfer funds between accounts. Mobile check depositing experienced a big uptick between surveys, though, with 21 percent of all mobile phone users mentioning they’d use these services.
More germane to our coverage here, though, the use of mobile phones to make point-of-sale payments went up threefold over that same year, though that still leaves the number at a small but growing 6 percent of all smartphone owners having used those devices to complete a purchase.
And again, the trends have only gone upward in the half-year since. So as we frequently remind you here, make sure you’re ahead of those curves — whether they’re being reported by the Fed or not — and anticipating where your customers will be, and what they’ll want, from electronic checks, to on-the-spot processing, to M-Commerce and more.
And then it’s okay if they showroom — cause you’ll be able to meet them wherever they decide to “check out and buy.”
