There is no disputing the fact that mobile shopping popularity is on a meteoric rise. Mobile payments set new records from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, with IBM reporting that for the first time ever, online traffic from mobile devices outpaced traditional PCs on Thanksgiving Day. And on Black Friday, online sales were up 9.5% year-over-year with mobile devices accounting for one-in-four of all online purchases. Is Mobile becoming the new Point of Sale? The jury is out but at Bluefin, we will soon have security concerns covered as we gear up to introduce our new PCI-validated Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) Solution for mobile payments.
It shouldn’t be surprising. For the past several years, those of us in payments have been hearing about the spike in mobile. How we need to prepare for the shift of payments from in-store, to web shopping, and finally to mobile phone shopping and purchase. And nowhere is this more evident than with recent Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday statistics. According to statistics from the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark:
- On Black Friday, one in four online purchases were made on a mobile device, and mobile sales accounted for 27.9% of total online sales, up 28.2% over 2013
- For the first time ever, online traffic from mobile devices outpaced traditional PCs on Thanksgiving Day, with browsing on smartphones and tablets accounting for 52.1% of all online traffic
- In department stores, Black Friday online sales grew by 22.9% over 2013, with mobile percentage of sales increasing by 25.7%
Now, no one is saying mobile will replace the retail experience of Black Friday shopping. There are plenty of die-hard shoppers who live for putting up that tent outside of WalMart at 3 pm on Thanksgiving. But the increase in mobile payments on these holidays demonstrates that shoppers don’t need to sit in line to get the best holiday deals. Today’s merchants are seeing incredible increases in mobile web traffic on hot shopping days. Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, both WalMart and JCPenney showed 50-70% of their web traffic coming from mobile devices.
We’re excited about the increase in mobile payment popularity because Bluefin specializes in payment security solutions for POS and Ecommerce – and we are gearing up to introduce our PCI-Validated Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) Solution for Mobile Payments, which will interface with our QuickSwipe Mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) system.
Because just as retailers and SMB’s need that consumer dollar, and there is preference toward mobile payments, according to a 2014 Authentic ID survey of 2,000 merchants, service providers, acquirers, card associations and issuers, 66% of respondents now actively support mobile – up 30% year over year. However, 32% view a mobile solution to be riskier than standard e-commerce offerings and say fraud prevention specific to mobile is increasingly necessary.
So – the mobile bandwagon is certainly still in effect, and Tom the Turkey is laughing to the bank with mobile phone in hand. But payment security is key and there is still plenty of work to do.
