10 Mobile Commerce Trends That Will Shape 2021

Will Mobile Commerce Trends Affect You?

Most likely, the answer is yes! Mobile technology has changed the way we live. Our smartphones are seemingly always within arm’s reach and dictate our daily habits. As a result, mobile commerce trends are evolving.

As an e-commerce store owner, you need to stay updated with the latest mobile commerce trends. Whether you’re using WordPress or another platform to sell online, you can’t ignore mobile consumers. And that includes paying attention to mobile commerce trends and how they potentially affect your online presence.

What Is Mobile Commerce?

You can think of mobile commerce as a sub-category of e-commerce.

Mobile commerce is the buying and selling of products and services with the help of – or entirely through – wireless mobile devices. For the most part, when we talk about e-commerce, we’re talking about smartphones, such as iPhones and Android devices.

But mobile commerce can also extend to tablets (such as iPads), e-readers (such as Kindles), and wearables (such as Apple Watches).

These days, you can buy almost anything with a mobile device, including food orders, car rides, and movie tickets. You can apply for a home loan, open a bank account, and take college classes, all in the palm of your hand.

10 Mobile Commerce Trends

Progressive Web Apps

One of the critical mobile commerce trends in the e-commerce industry is PWA or Progressive Web Apps. Online businesses are always trying to improve their sales and enhance the customer experience in their online storefronts.

For the last few years, brands have been encouraged to think mobile first when setting up their websites. A progressive web app is a website that has the form of a mobile application.

Native mobile apps can be expensive to develop and launch. We’ll see more brands taking advantage of PWAs to provide a better, faster mobile experience while still leveraging a browser.

Mobile Shopping Apps

One of the most significant mobile commerce trends is the increasing use of mobile shopping apps. It is no secret that more and more consumers are using their mobile devices to buy online. I have already mentioned how mobile commerce is dominating the global e-commerce market share. But the way people are using those devices to shop is changing.

In 2019, 57% of US consumers used a mobile retail app to learn more about a product. Statista

Of course, you need to have a mobile-friendly website in 2021. But a mobile-optimized e-commerce site isn’t enough to have success in this space anymore. 2021 will become the year of mobile shopping apps.

Rather than using an Internet browser, more than half of US shoppers went straight for a mobile app to accommodate their shopping needs. This change in consumer behavior is a game-changer for online store owners.

Online consumers can access mobile apps and mobile sites from multiple devices. For the most part, you can segment mobile devices into two categories: smartphones and tablets.

By the end of 2021, $221.2 billion mobile commerce sales will come from smartphones, compared to $41.8 billion from tablets. As tablets trend down, it means that smartphone sales volume is on the rise. These are the devices that consumers are using when they shop online.

Omni-Channel Retail

In simple terms, omnichannel retail is the practice of selling products through multiple channels. An e-commerce website, mobile app, and physical store would all qualify as different mediums here.

Shopping, these days, can involve a range of devices and information sources. An omnichannel strategy means participating in and shaping the process across the whole spectrum. With omnichannel retail, the idea is to tie it all together to provide a cohesive experience. However, a customer interacts with your brand.

For those of you with a physical retail presence in addition to an online store, you cannot treat those customers differently.

Consumers are beginning to expect a unified experience across channels. For example, suppose you register an account through a store’s website. In that case, you expect the same login information to work on the app. If you order an item online, you want to be able to exchange it in a store.

One-Click Ordering

Online ordering is another of the mobile commerce trends you need to heed in 2021! The shift to shopping from mobile apps will ease the checkout process in 2021. Placing an order online has historically required quite a bit of information from the consumer.

Processing transactions on an e-commerce store requires consumers to provide a lot of personal information:

• Customer name
• Credit card number
• Credit card expiration
• Card verification number
• Shipping address
• Billing address
• Email address

Manually entering this information each time a customer wants to buy something online is tedious. It’s incredibly inconvenient from the small screen of a mobile device.

That’s one of the main obstacles to reducing shopping cart abandonment on mobile websites. The abandonment rate of mobile site shopping carts is 97%. But the shopping cart abandonment rate from mobile apps is just 20%.

The reason behind this is simple. A mobile e-commerce app allows you to store customer information to their user profile. When it’s time to complete their purchase, consumers don’t need to enter their details each time manually.

One-click ordering makes it possible for customers to complete the entire purchase process in, you guessed it, one click. This functionality is a win-win scenario for both parties.

For online store owners, conversions will increase. For online consumers, this eliminates the pain points of buying. They can find what they need and buy it in a matter of seconds directly from a mobile commerce app.

Social Commerce

In the past, businesses faced significant challenges to convert social traffic into sales. It was a pain to navigate from a social media post to an e-commerce product page for consumers.

With consumers, online more than ever and scrolling social to bridge the gap with some of the personal connections they’re lacking, social commerce has been on the rise.

With shoppable Facebook pages and Instagram shoppable posts, customers have a more direct way to buy products they see on social media. Shoppers can click on the product to buy directly without being forced to open a new browser, navigate to your website, and search for the product on their own.

In 2021, more brands will be partnering with social sites for advertising and building e-commerce transactions into social sites. Consumers can scroll, shop, and connect with their friends and favorite brands at the same time. Store owners will make more investments to perform e-commerce transactions within a social app.

Voice Shopping

Voice shopping is one of the mobile commerce trends many online store owners tend to overlook. And in 2021, that will work against them.

Over the years, voice assistants like Siri and Alexa have been growing in popularity and acceptance. And this is changing the way consumers use voice search. At first, people used voice search for things like weather-related questions. Or they were maybe telling their smart speaker to play music.

In 2021, voice search has penetrated the e-commerce market. Voice shopping will reach $40 billion by 2022. That’s up from a modest $2 billion in 2018, a 1,900% increase in just four years.

This increase will significantly impact mobile commerce since 40% of adults use voice search at least once per day. Voice search accounts for 20% of all searches on mobile devices. 51% of people use voice commands to research products. 22% of people use voice search to make a purchase.

For starters, you must optimize your website for voice search. But it would help if you planned on making your mobile app friendly for voice shopping as well.

Even consumers that don’t own a smart speaker still have access to voice search and voice assistance from their mobile devices. That’s why voice shopping will have a profound impact on the mobile commerce trends of 2021.

Mobile Chatbots

Chatbots have been around for decades. You’ve likely interacted with chatbots in your personal life for a wide variety of reasons.

Some of you might already be leveraging chatbot technology on your e-commerce website. It’s one of the best ways to provide customer service, and it’s increasing in popularity.

While chatbots have become a regular part of life, surprisingly, they haven’t fully penetrated the mobile world. Most apps on the market today are not using chatbots, but that will change in 2021.

It’s not uncommon for customers to need assistance when they’re shopping online. And over half of online consumers will choose a chatbot over a human rep if it saves them time. Therefore, many e-commerce websites provide this functionality already.

Getting those questions or problems resolved as quickly as possible improves the customer experience and saves online store owners a lot of money. The popularity of mobile commerce chatbots will continue to grow in the future as well. And this makes them one of the critical mobile commerce trends in 2021.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Virtual reality and augmented reality have been popular buzzwords in the tech space for quite some time now. Mobile shopping apps have already started to use AR to improve the customer shopping experience.

Adopting Augmented Reality (AR) has increased in popularity as brands work to give consumers a look into how a product would fit into their lives.

Let’s say you sell clothing on your e-commerce website. With a retail mobile app, you can use AR to measure customers and recommend the perfect fit. You could even customize orders based on a person’s exact dimensions. Think of it as a virtual tailor.

Amazon has the “See how it looks” option on many of its products, giving consumers the ability to scan their mobile devices over an area in their home. With the use of AR, see how an item would fit into their space.

The potential for this technology makes it one of the more exciting mobile commerce trends for 2021. Just imagine the possibilities!

Mobile Payments

Over the past few years, mobile wallets have been increasing in popularity. This fact holds for both online and in-store purchases.

Consumers are using mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Alipay to checkout when shopping from a mobile retail app. It’s a quick, safe, and secure way for them to shop. They also use these wallets to participate in brick-and-mortar locations with touchless pay capabilities.

Wearables, like Apple Watch, can even be used to facilitate mobile wallet payments.

Mobile payment volume will increase tenfold by 2021. Statista

If you’re selling online, this is one of the mobile commerce trends you need to adapt to in 2021.

Mobile Fraud

Unfortunately, cybercrime has become a real concern for everyone today. Consumers are hesitant to provide personal information to third parties that don’t have an established reputation as a brand that is trustworthy.

Lack of consumer trust can be a problem for smaller boutique e-commerce shops. Suppose you’re selling products similar to well-established brands. In that case, a customer might feel more comfortable buying from a name that they recognize.

That’s why every e-commerce business must prevent fraud on every channel, including mobile devices.

Apps are less susceptible to phishing scams and other common attacks that occur from mobile web browsers. And by nature, apps are more secure as well.

Customers don’t have to manually enter their payment information for each transaction, as I mentioned earlier. An app can safely store all customer and payment data to protect it from a possible breach.

As mobile fraud continues to rise, consumers will be looking for the most secure way to shop online. A mobile app is much more secure than a mobile browser. And that makes using mobile apps one of the critical mobile commerce trends of 2021.

Preparing for Mobile Commerce Trends in 2021

Mobile commerce trends will continue to play a significant role in the e-commerce industry for the foreseeable future. As an e-commerce store owner, you need to keep a close eye on mobile commerce trends to plan accordingly.

The easiest way to keep up with the times and change technology is by building a mobile app for your e-commerce website. Mobile apps are how consumers prefer to shop in 2021. All of the mobile e-commerce trends are pointing in this direction.

By the end of 2021, mobile devices will make up almost 73% of total e-commerce sales globally. This increase means assessing your brand mobile experience is crucial to remaining competitive and delivering the consumer experience needed to meet the top mobile commerce trends of 2021.

Assuring that your e-commerce store is mobile-friendly is more important than ever. The pandemic has catapulted mobile e-commerce and expectations of these avenues in the consumer’s eyes.

If you don’t meet those needs, expect results, just not the ones you anticipated. About 30% of consumers will abandon their carts in the middle of shopping if they run into issues with a brand’s mobile site.

Is it Enough to Have an E-Commerce Website?

If you’ve ever tried to navigate a desktop-sized website on a phone-sized screen, you know how frustrating it can be – so much scrolling sideways and the pinch and zoom are the worst!  Bad shopping experiences are bad for business.

Suppose your e-commerce site is still in the desktop-based past. In that case, it can drive away customers who prefer to shop on their smartphones and who have a low tolerance for unwieldy design. Sales conversion rates on mobile sites are much lower than on desktop sites for this reason.

Consumers like to browse on their mobile devices. Still, when it comes to buying, they tend to prefer the more fluid checkout provided by well-designed desktop sites.

Suppose mobile users keep abandoning their carts on your e-commerce site. In that case, it may be because the site does not provide a smooth, accessible mobile experience.

Do You Need Help Preparing for Mobile Commerce Trends?

Of course, we would be happy to help you prepare to meet any of these mobile commerce trends. We are experts at carefully crafting custom mobile-first websites and online stores to meet demanding mobile consumers’ expectations.

Use our handy website cost estimator to determine the cost of starting your online business. Use the coupon code “NewEcommerceStore2021” to get a 25% discount for starting your e-commerce business in 2021!

Here at PixoLabo, we offer a full range of website consulting and design services for businesses and product brands, including custom web design and development, e-commerce solutions, search engine optimization, brand design, and WordPress optimization.

If you are not sure how to prepare for mobile commerce trends, don’t worry! Reach out and contact us. Our expert team will listen to you, answer your questions, and determine the best way for you to attract, convert, and retain loyal online consumers. That is one of our specialties, after all!

Are You Prepared for Mobile Commerce Trends?

We would love to hear your feedback regarding mobile commerce. Are you selling online? Have you anticipated any of the trends listed above? If so, how are you preparing for them? Do you have any other mobile commerce trends you would like to share?

Please leave your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And help your friends and associates to meet the challenges of running their own e-commerce business by sharing this post with them.

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita