Tag Archives: e-commerce

Snapcash

Mobile money transfers just got a whole lot easier thanks to a company most probably wouldn’t have suspected. Snapchat, the mobile app famous for its timed viewing of photos (and its association with lewd photos) recently launched Snapcash. Snapcash is a partnership with mobile payment tech company Square that enables Snapchat users to send cash by simply typing a monetary amount in a Snapchat chat window and pressing send. Banking information is stored within the app and the recipient receives the money as quickly as they received your last selfie.

Snapchat has entered into the mobile payment realm. Photo source: E! Online

This is a pretty big step forward for instant money transfers in North America. We, of course, have Google Wallet and Apple Pay which helps businesses collect more easily from consumers, but Snapcash is definitely geared towards transfers and payments between consumers. Owe someone $5? Snapcash it to them. $20 for the movie last night? Snapcash it. With a monthly limit of $1000, there is a lot of room for small payments for the ordinary user.

So what does this mean for marketers? As of right now, not a whole lot. It’s simply a cool feature in a very popular mobile app. However, I’d highly doubt it will remain this way for long. Payment transfer through the app simply screams app monetization. Techcrunch agreed: “For example, the app could one day send you a Snap or show a Story ad from a merchant, and let you buy the product shown instantly through Snapchat.” Collecting banking and credit card information, and having the ability to transfer funds, opens the door to possible advertising revenue — an area that many mobile apps and social networks have continued to struggle to exploit.

Personally, I’d struggle with the issue of trusting Snapchat with my banking information. Snapchat is a fast photo-sharing app – it has never required secure information before. Of course, we all trusted Snapchat with our photos with the notion that the photos are ‘deleted’ as soon as they’re viewed. We learned that this was untrue, and the developers never even made the app this way. Just earlier this year, Snapchat suffered a large data breach over the information of four million of its users. Very little has been said about just how secure the money transfer software is. It is supplied by Square, which has proven secure, but it’s offered over the Snapchat platform. Some people are skeptical of its security, and a data breach with banking information could be bad news for the company if it was ever to occur.

Sound Off: Are you going to use Snapcash? Do you think it’s secure? How can Snapcash be used for marketing?

The rise of freemium?

Just recently, YouTube announced the upcoming release of it’s new paid streaming music service Music Key. Although some of the more specific technical details of the service have yet to be announced, the website promises three key things: (1) ad-free music, (2) background listening, and (3) offline playback. Reportedly, this service will be valued at $10 a month for subscribers. Mashable took a stab at explaining the rationale behind the new service.

This is actually a pretty big deal. Not because this hasn’t been done before. A quick look at a little old app called Spotify would disprove that notion. However, it’s no secret that YouTube is one of the most visited websites in the world, averaging 1 billion visitors a month. On top of that, the site is owned by Internet giant Google. The launch of Music Key indicates an experiment with freemium subscriptions on one of the most widely used platforms on the Internet – and one that is very much known for being 100% free.

Freemium is a pricing strategy by which a product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods.

Freemium appears to be popping up everywhere these days. From in-app purchases, such as in Clash of Clans that leads to media-reported £7,000 phone bills, to social networks such as LinkedIn that charge more for in-depth services and features, Internet companies, app developers, and the likes look to be diversifying the ways in which they generate revenue online. Gone are the days where ads paid the bills and generate revenue for artists. Now, there’s the possibility of raising money from those Internet browsers who need that extra bit of service hidden behind the paywall.

But does Freemium guarantee success? I would say no. Consumers are used to getting things for free on the Internet (unless they’re online shopping). There needs to be a considerable amount of incentive to pay a subscription fee, when it is so easy to access free information and/or content with just a few more clicks. A post on Forbes would agree stating that, for freemium, you need: the right market, with a gap in said market; a compelling reason to upgrade; and proper metrics to measure success.

So will YouTube Music Key be successful? It remains to be seen. YouTube is a massive Internet entity – so the success of its paid option will be watched by many. Success in the freemium market for such a popular, formerly 100% free website could cause significant changes to the Internet landscape.

Sound Off: Do you think freemium services are here to stay? Do you think YouTube’s new streaming music venture will be successful?

Mobile commerce rapidly growing

By Q2 2013, experts were estimating that 25% of online sales transactions would occur on a mobile device by 2017. Reports show that by Q2 2014, a full year following this estimate, mobile commerce traffic had already increased by 125%. Important to note is that this is the first time that mobile commerce has overtaken tablet commerce in the online sales transaction market. This is pretty big. Customers may very well be on the way to becoming more comfortable with making a quick purchase off of their iPhone or Android, rather than having the desire to fully browse on a more interactive and larger tablet or desktop platform or, of course, by actually touching an item in a traditional brick-and-mortar store.

Mobile commerce is on the rise. Image from fastcompany.net.

The rise in mobile commerce is not without some issues of course. As the Econsultancy article outlines, “a mobile customer’s visit to an ecommerce website has a 50% higher bounce rate, a 30% lower add-to-cart rate, and is 10% more likely to abandon cart.”

Mobile developers and advertisers are working to combat these rates, however. Just recently, AdWords announced an upgrade to their mobile ads. For example, as discussed on Marketing Pilgrim, AdWords’ new Mobile Lightbox Engagement Ads, generated ads will now dynamically resize to fit the screen. Mobile ads will start to do what we have seen on desktop platforms for a couple of years now: advertisements will start small before expanding into visually appealing, dynamic advertisements. Some consumers may be annoyed, of course, but these mobile advertisements will no longer go unnoticed nor will they no longer be improperly optimized for our mobile devices.

Combined with this and many retailers’ efforts to make sure their own online stores are mobile optimized, we can’t forget that social media giant Twitter is experimenting with their own “Buy Now” button. While no results are available yet, Burberry tested out the button on sponsored tweets that were available to select U.S. Twitter users during London Fashion Week. If this feature rolls out mainstream, the ability to buy things on your iPhone will become extraordinarily easy and potentially risky for impulse buyers — but this could be a huge aid to reaching that 25% by 2017 estimate that experts made last year.

E-commerce is growing at a quick rate. If retailers and developers can create e-commerce platforms for mobile devices that are attractive, optimized, easy-to-use, and secure for consumers, mobile commerce poses a huge opportunity for businesses and marketers to boost sales.

Sound Off: Are you going to use Snapcash? Do you think it’s secure? How can Snapcash be used for marketing?

Sound Off: Do you think freemium services are here to stay? Do you think YouTube’s new streaming music venture will be successful?

Sound Off: Are you comfortable online shopping off of your mobile phone? What sort of features/elements do you look for while mobile shopping?