Worldpay: Businesses, Brace Yourself For Mobile Shoppers

If it seems like mobile is accepted in more places these days, that’s likely because it is. Between mobile payments systems like Apple Pay and beyond stepping in, and businesses putting mobile to work in more ways—like the idea of every mobile device serving as a checkout stand—mobile has plenty more options these days. A new report from Worldpay says that businesses need to be ready to work with this development, because customers aren’t going to want to wait much longer to have access to such tools.

Worldpay makes the price of failure here clear: if businesses don’t keep up with mobile developments, customers will simply migrate to businesses who do. Its look at the ecommerce market in the UK alone says it will be worth 203 billion pounds sterling—about $273 billion US as of this writing—and that’s enough to put it just behind China and the United States.

It also projects that mobile shoppers will increasingly make payments with ewallets instead of debit cards; debit card payments in the UK market are set to drop from 31 percent of the overall ecommerce market right now to just 26 percent by 2021. Meanwhile, ewallets will rise to 34 percent of the market at that time point.

The total ecommerce market in the UK is set to grow 21 percent annually on average over the next five years. That’s actually a faster rate than not only the US, but also Japan and even China. That means huge competition likely to hit, and a clarion call for businesses to get to work on accepting mobile in rapid fashion.

We’ve already seen plenty of developments in this market, and plenty of use cases for mobile technology. All that’s left is for businesses to bite the bullet and put it all in play. This will likely have to start by optimizing sites for mobile, if that hasn’t already been done by now, and then expanding outward to take advantage of the best in mobile according to the business’ individual structure.

Mobile is likely to be a bigger part of business going forward, and that’s thanks to the wide array of possibilities involved here. Taking advantage of this development should pay off well for businesses with enough forward thinking to see the value.