Canadian Retailer - Summer 2015 - 29

thE facts about mobile's growing role in the daily

lives of Canadians tell a compelling story.
Nearly 28 million Canadians own a mobile device, and
more than half own smartphones-a significant jump
from 2012 when 33 per cent owned smartphones. A full
eighty per cent of Canadians say they won't leave home
without their mobile devices, and if texts are an indication of usage, when they use their phones, they use them
a lot-each day, Canadians send 270 million texts.
In the retail sphere, mobile's influence
continues to increase. One in five Canadians report to have made a purchase on their phone, and one in six
Canadians have scanned a QR code.
Nearly everybody (97 per cent) uses
their phone at home and more than
three-quarters of Canadians use
smartphones in a store. Half of
Canadians with mobile devices
say they want to use their smartphones to store membership cards.
Nearly everybody with a smartphone
is open to using their phones in new and different ways, especially among Millennials, those
who grew up with the Internet and adopt new
technologies quickest.
The future of mobile commerce appears
to be the story of a commonplace technology. Mobile will become part of the retail
experience in the same way that credit cards have
come to power so much commerce: the technology
will become so natural we might forget it's there.

the business changes

eBay is one company banking on a market shift towards what Andrea Stairs calls "mobile ubiquity."
"We're heading towards mobile ubiquity, the point
where mobile is no longer a stand-alone part of the
everyday infrastructure," says the country manager
of eBay Canada.
The online retailer has already restructured itself internally to make mobile commerce part of a continuum,
not a stand-alone channel. eBay's mobile division used
to be a stand-alone group "working their black magic,"
and now, Stairs says, the group is part of everything
that happens in the company. The goal now is to make
the customer experience "seamless" in every way.
eBay's shift has been driven by customer behaviour. A study of Ebay's sales shows that on a global
basis, 44 per cent of transactions on eBay are touched
by mobile, whether that involves searching for product information on a mobile device or checking out.
"Ebay is almost there," says Stairs-there being prepared for a retail environment where mobile reigns.

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Consumers are already there, she notes. But it's traditional retailers who "have a long way to go to catch up
with the inroads ecommerce retailers have made into
the mobile channel."
driven by desire

If behaviours of eBay's customers offer insight into
shifting attitudes towards mobile, retailers can expect
an increasing willingness to use mobile channels in
the general population.
Already, more than half of eBay's global buyers
make purchases across multiple screens-PC, tablets, phones-an indication of consumers' appetite or
ecommerce, says Stairs.
And it's a voracious appetite.
Stairs says eBay is seeing mobile purchases on
the site's industrial category-a category that most
people might not consider a likely candidate for
mobile shopping. One consumer used eBay's mobile channel to purchase the most expensive item
on the site-a $32,000 front-end loader.
On the other side of the retail equation, eBay
has seen a dramatic increase in how retailers sell
through the ecommerce giant. Eight million listings have been added to eBay using a mobile device, and sellers are using mobile for all aspects of
their retail operations, including on-the-fly pricing
and to manage online sales.
paying for it

One fork in the mobile road is how customers will use
their devices to pay for goods inside brick-and-mortar
stores. Right now, customers at some stores have a
popular option: the store's app. At Starbucks, customers can pay for their drinks with the chain's popular
app. For fans of Starbucks, it's a huge convenience. The
challenge for the future will be whether a phone full
of retail apps-all of them "closed ecosystems"-will
prove to be more convenient than a payment system
that has a more fluid kind of currency.
It might take some time before Canadians open up
their phones the same way they open up their wallets.
An online survey of Canadians released in October
2014 shows that Canadians love to pay with credit and
cash but haven't yet warmed to the idea of using their
phones to pay at the cash. Only 10 per cent of respondents have used a mobile app to pay for a purchase.
Derek Cofler, head of mobile at Visa Canada, says
Canadians have good reason to become comfortable
with using their phones as a payment device-first,
because technologies are making it easier and safer
to pay-by-phone, and second, because Canada's infrastructure might make pay-by-phone an easy choice
for busy consumers.

Summer 2015 | canadian REtailER

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Canadian Retailer - Summer 2015

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