Mobile Payments Cited as a Cause of Growth in Smartwatches

It would be easy to look askance at the smartwatch, and wonder why anyone would need such a thing.

These devices don’t do much that a full smartphone won’t do already, so why bother with this essentially wrist-mounted display mechanism? The funny thing is, more people are indeed bothering, and mobile payments are one of the biggest reasons why.

Word came down from the Telsyte Australian Smartphone & Wearable Devices Market Study 2016-2020, which spelled out some of the new developments in this market, at least in the Australian region. One of the biggest revelations in the field was that sales for the first half of 2016 were up 89 percent, nearly double, over the first half of 2015.

That’s a huge jump, but driving it were suspects both likely and unlikely.

One of the biggest and least surprising causes of gains in the market were lowered costs. Telsyte noted that Apple’s practice of premium prices was slowing down the growth of the entire smartwatch industry, and it was hard to quibble there, noting that users were paying prices on par with entire tablets or smartphones.

Reducing the prices, therefore, would give users less reason to stay out of the market. Getting users into the market was the other issue, and that was addressed by not only increasing smartphone lifecycles—less need for or interest in replacing a smartphone annually—but also increasing use cases.

This is where mobile payments comes into play. Mobile payments allow users to pay directly from a device, and this makes a smartwatch an excellent platform for mobile payments systems.

The device is already on hand—no need to withdraw a smartphone from its pocket to make purchases—and since it interfaces directly with a smartphone, it accomplishes the same purpose.

That convenience is proving helpful by any standard, and combining all these together yields a great end result.

Convenience, lower prices, greater use cases…all of these together make for big sales in smartwatches. It’s amazing that mobile payments had a hand in bringing back a line of technology, but that’s just par for the course with this exciting new technology. We’ll likely only see more developments like this coming to light in the coming months.