Social commerce is “three years behind” mobile shopping in terms of value to retailers, according to eBay’s UK retail chief Angus McCarey, who claims that mobile will drive more retail changes in the next three years than anything in the last 20. “In the next three years, there’s going to be more changes in the way people shop and pay for things than there has been in the last 20,” he says, speaking at the Guardian Mobile Business Summit. “There will be four critical trends, and mobile is definitely the most important.”
While McCarey believes that social, local and digital will all influence retail over the coming years, he dismisses social as a game-changer on its own. “We don’t yet see social driving a huge volume of transactions,” he says. “Social shopping is still in that early stage and it’s probably three years behind mobile.”
In the last two years, eBay has seen 50m users download its apps, dominated primarily by iOS and Android users. McCarey also says eBay underestimated its global mobile sales figure, pinning revenues at USD4bn. The firm will actually close the year with around USD5bn in sales made via connected devices such as smartphones or tablets. While this still represents only a fraction of eBay’s USD60bn global business, McCarey predicts that a “huge” portion of business will involve mobile.
Whitepapers
Related reading
Central banks best suited to issue digital currencies
By Aaran Fronda A recent report by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) said that central banks rather than private ... read more
Instant payments: innovations inbound for corporates
In 2020, instant payments look set to continue their current trajectory to become the biggest trend in payments. While these schemes already offer numerous benefits to corporates, leveraging innovations such as APIs and request to pay will go some way to unlocking their full potential, argues Michael Knetsch
Obstacles exist for banks to meet ECB’s instant payments goal
The cost of joining instant payment platforms will be one of many hurdles banks and payment services providers must overcome to meet ... read more
Banks must be aware of “biases” in data used to train ML models
Financial institutions need to be conscious of biases in the historical data that is being used to train machine learning (ML) models, ... read more
