"e-commerce" entries

Commerce Weekly: Mobile wallets and NFC get a global partnership platform

Vodafone to launch a mobile wallet, a startup mines the science of shopper behavior, and a kickstarter campaign to bring NFC to iOS.

Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week.

Vodafone partners up to launch a new mobile wallet platform

Yet another mobile wallet is gearing up to hit the market in 2013. Vodafone announced a partnership with m-commerce company CorFire and digital security company Gemalto to launch the platform in the first quarter of 2013 in Germany and Spain with plans to expand across Europe, according to a report at Bloomberg.

Natasha Lomas at TechCrunch reports that the initial rollout will focus on NFC-equipped Android devices and that the services “will be compatible with the standards chosen by Weve” (formerly known as Project Oscar). According to Lomas, Dr. Jae Chung, CorFire’s president and CEO, noted the platform’s potential in a released statement: “Vodafone’s customer base spans across more than 30 countries, which means our partnership may become one of the biggest, global implementations of NFC and mobile commerce.”

James Wester at Mobile Payments Today reports that Vodafone’s plan for its more than 400 million subscribers around the globe goes beyond the mobile wallet — plans include developing the platform so that third-party service providers can access the subscriber base.

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Commerce Weekly: Big data in retail

Big data and mobile are changing retail. NFC? Not so much.

Here are a few stories from the commerce space that caught my attention this week:

Mom and pops sidelined by big data?

Gary Hawkins at the Harvard Business Review took a look this week at marketing and research in the commerce space and argued that the costs associated with big data advantages may be wiping out the little guy. Hawkins writes:

“In this war for customers, the ammunition is data — and lots of it. It began with transaction data and shopper data, which remain central. Now, however, they are being augmented by demographic data, in-store video monitoring, mobile-based location data from inside and outside the store, real-time social media feeds, third-party data appends, weather, and more. Retail has entered the era of Big Data.”

Hawkins points out that this level of consumer intelligence is highly advantageous and even more expensive, thus only retailers with adequate resources (read: deep, deep pockets) can compete. Citing a study (PDF) by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, he notes that “annual industry spending on shopper marketing at over $50 billion, and growing.”

In addition to sidelining smaller retailers, the shopper marketing trend is having a more pervasive effect on the industry as a whole by changing the distribution of budgeted marketing expenditures. “Trade promotion accounted for 44% of total marketing expenditures by manufacturers in 2011, lower than any other year in the past decade,” Hawkins notes. The reason for the shift is all about the ROI — quoting Matthew Boyle of CNN Money, Hawkins writes that “the partnership of Kroger and dunnhumby ‘is generating millions in revenue by selling Kroger’s shopper data to consumer goods giants’ … It is widely understood that Kroger is realizing over $100 million annually in incremental revenue from these efforts.”

This model not only caters to large retailers over smaller retailers because of the size of their wallets, but because it’s easier for brands to interact with the corporate headquarters of a major retailer with 1,000 stores than to interact with 1,000 owners of independent stores, Hawkins writes. He goes into detail about how this business model will affect the industry on several fronts — you can read his piece in its entirety here.

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Commerce Weekly: Mobile commerce is on the rise globally

Survey shows consumers want mobile commerce, EU notes possible monopoly troubles, and commuters get app tickets.

TNS Global's Mobile Life Survey results are out, the EU is investigating a mobile wallet project, and Boston rail commuters soon can pay fares with their smartphones. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps

Developer Challenge offers big prizes for best apps using new APIs

Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are “A platform beats an application every time” and “All the smart people don’t work for you.” Online payment giant PayPal took those bits of wisdom to heart and recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal’s director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers.