Stores losing allure fast, as preference for mobile shopping grows: Mastercard

Preference for in-store shopping is falling particularly quickly in India, according to new research from the credit-card company.

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Mastercard's new Mobile Shopping Survey shows that Philippines and Malaysia are the top growth markets for mcommerce, with increases of 12.6 percent and 10.1 percent, respectively.

For the second year, India remains the market with the highest percentage of mobile shoppers; 75.8 percent of consumers reported at least one mobile purchase in the three months before the survey. China (71.4 percent) and Thailand (65 percent) followed India.

Overall, Indian shoppers also demostrated the biggest slide in preference for in-store shopping, with those favouring the store experience falling by 10.3 percent since 2015 to 44.4 percent. The decline has been less steep regionally, from 48.6 percent in 2015 to 45.9 percent in the latest survey.

The ANZ nations are tied with the lowest number of mobile shoppers at 26 percent, followed by Japan at 31 percent.

Both China and Thailand have widely adopted mobile payment systems on messaging apps such as WeChat Pay (China) and Line Pay (Thailand). In fact, 42.6 percent of consumers Chinese consumers used QR code payments in their mobile shopping. A Quartz report, quoting data from research firm 7Park Data, states that Flipkart is the most popular ecommerce mobile app in India (30.7 percent), followed closely by Amazon (30.3 percent) and Snapdeal (10.8 percent). Google this week launched its own mobile payment app, Tez, in India.

The Mastercard survey polled a total of 8,738 consumers from across 14 APAC markets including North Asia, ANZ, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam in November last year.

Benjamin Gilbey, SVP, digital payments and labs, APAC, Mastercard, said the results give impetus to greater public-private partnerhsip to facilitate "interoperabiity' among the different payment systems. "Recent progress made in this direction, such as the standardising of QR-based payments in India and Thailand, has been encouraging," said Gilbey in a statement.

Other highlights from the Mastercard study:

53.6 percent of consumers cite convenience as a key reason for shopping for mobile.
Clothing and fasion accessories are the top online purchases (34.9 percent), followed by beauty products (21 percent) and movie tickets (20.2 percent). Mobile shoppers from Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan prefer to buy books, CDs, DVDs, toys and gifts on mobile.
China and South Korea are the top two markets where consumers like to shop for items from supermarkets via mobile.