By 2020, One in Five United States POS Payments Will Be Mobile

If it ever seems like mobile payments are more of something someone else is using somewhere else, it’s not hard to think like that.

But mobile payments are gaining a lot of ground in many different places, and a new report from the Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group shows just how far this field has to go.

According to the report, consumers in the United States will turn to smartphones five times a week to make purchases just by 2018. By 2020, that number will actually rise further to the point where one transaction in five at a point of sale system will be mobile device-based.

That’s a lot of transactions that will go mobile and in a comparatively short time. What’s more, the report also noted that, by 2020, at least 60 percent of all digital commerce revenue in the United States will be mobile-based, proving that this platform has serious legs for shopping, not just in brick-and-mortar operations, but also online.

With the holiday shopping season approaching, it’s worth starting to consider just how goods and services will be sold throughout the United States, and beyond. This is a development that should be amazing; it was only a few years ago when eBay blew everyone away by introducing a mobile shopping system in a promotion with bliss spa, and ever since, mobile payments have shaken up the landscape.

We’ve gone in just a few short years from a novelty promoted by an online auction house in conjunction with a spa that offered Black Friday shopping in the midst of spa treatments to a platform that’s used on a regular basis in a host of locations and will likely only increase in total use. The idea that one in five transactions will involve mobile devices by the end of just 2020 is a staggering one, and based on what’s arrived so far, it’s not even that hard to see happen.

We’ve got a host of different mobile payment platforms, we’re seeing some of these be built into wearable devices, others are being built directly into vehicles so a car can pay for a drive-through purchase…add all of that together, and somehow, it makes sense that one in five payments could come from a mobile device.

While there’s a long way to go until 2020, what we’ve seen so far from the mobile payments industry suggests that, indeed, this could be the start of serious gains for the platform. Everything we’ve seen up to now may simply be prologue for a more mobile-heavy future, and that’s a development a lot of us can get behind.