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The Malta Independent | Thursday 19 March 2015
Small business owners see revenue and growth potential in mobile apps 68% of small businesses believe that having a mobile app would help them sell more and engage better with their customers. However, in an increasingly mobile environment where consumers are using their smart devices to find product information and store locations on the go, more than three quarters (78%) do not currently have a mobile solution or mobile app for their business. These were the findings of a survey conducted by Endurance International Group with more than 900 of its U.S.-based small business customers. “Creating an effective online and mobile presence is critical for small businesses to stay competitive and relevant to their customers,” said Hari Ravichandran, founder and CEO of Endurance. “Historically, sales success has been driven by word of mouth, customer service, or competitive pricing. But with the rise of mobile, customers increasingly control the reins - they have access to information about competitive products and pricing at their fingertips, long before they step foot into your business.” “For small business owners, it’s important that they have access to affordable, easy-to-use tools that can get them online and mobile without complication. Our survey shows that small businesses understand the growth opportunities associated with mobile applications, but many feel that they don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to create or manage a mobile solution for their business. That’s why En-
durance continues to invest in developing first-in-class mobile tools for small business owners because every business, not just the ones with deep pockets, should be able to take advantage of the growing mobile opportunity,” said Ravichandran. The $500 Billion Opportunity Digital devices’ influence on instore purchase behaviour is growing: more than $500 billion (€475 billion) in sales is now influenced by mobile content. By the end of 2014, the portion of mobile-influenced in-store retail sales was expected to jump to more than 50%. A vast majority of small business owners understand this opportunity - more than 70% of survey respondents feel having a mobile solution or app would positively impact their business - but they are slow to act because of the perceived barriers to entry.
Immediate Obstacles The top challenges facing small businesses in regard to mobile, according to respondents, are not having a mobile presence (50%); reaching a new, younger customer demographic (37%); and too much time and resources required to enable mobile sales (37%). Despite recognition that they must have a mobile presence to stay competitive, small business owners encounter barriers before they can begin. Half of respondents cite lack of skill and knowledge as the biggest barrier to having a mobile solution or app and nearly a quarter (22%) cite concerns about cost.
Mobile Leads the Future The outlook for small businesses on mobile is strong - survey participants are willing to explore and take advantage of an effective strategy. More than half of respondents (55%) agree that mobile tools are fundamentally changing the nature of sales for their business. As small businesses consider mobile solutions, respondents named device platform and compatibility (59%), ease of content authoring and content management system (“CMS”) integration (47%) and personalisation and easy customization (46%) as the top three most important features from a
list of seven. Nearly three quarters of survey participants (71%) plan to make a financial investment in mobile solutions within the next two years. In more detail, the survey found that 78% of respondents do not have a mobile solution or app for their business even though 71% felt that having a mobile solution or app would positively impact business. The biggest barrier to creating a mobile solution or app for their business is lack of skill and knowledge (50%), lack of time to maintain (23%), cost to develop (22%) and concerns about security representing the smallest percentage (5%). 65% of small business owners agree that a mobile presence is required to stay competitive and 87% agree they are comfortable adopting new technologies once they become mainstream. 23% agree that having a mobile app is not worth the business risk whilst 77% disagree. Moreover, 55% agree that mobile solutions are fundamentally changing the nature of sales for their business. Accordingly, the most important features when it comes to considering a mobile solution are related to compatibility (59%), integration with other technologies (32%), and simplicity of content authoring (47%) and personalisation (46%). 51% plan to make a financial investment in digital tools in 2015. The will be investing in the following mobile solutions mobile web (28%), Cloud-based systems for e-commerce and e-marketing (12%) and mobile apps (8%).
Survey: what devices do consumers across the world use to shop online?
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here are significant differences in the preferred devices for online shopping based on the country of the consumer. 62% of all respondents worldwide answered that their usual device for “online
shopping” is still the desktop computer or laptop. In Australia, that figure rises to 70%. In the US, 63% prefer online shopping on their computers. However, in the UK almost half (48%) prefer to shop on their mobile device. No respondents from
the UK answered that they never shop online. In Japan, only 51% responded that they usually shop online with a computer. This was revealed from a survey conducted by OHT-Mobile, the mobile division of One Hour Translation - an online translation agency. The survey was jointly carried out with Google Consumer Surveys based on a representative sample of 800 respondents - 100 each from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada,
Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. “This survey shows that mcommerce is catching up with ecommerce in terms of preferred device for shopping, but there are still big differentiations between countries,” said Ofer Shoshan, CEO of One Hour Translation. “Online retailers should be aware of the different preferences of the audience in each area and be sure to localise their mobile sites and applica-
tions for each audience.” The survey results follow similar results of a One Hour Translation survey completed in Q4 of 2014 with 2,000 participants from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan and Canada. According to that survey, 83% of Italians prefer to buy goods and services online in their native language, compared with 80% of Germans, 65% of the Dutch, 74% of Canadians and no less than 90% of Japanese people.
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The Malta Independent | Thursday 19 March 2015
Roderick Spiteri
Roderick Spiteri is Marketing and Communications Manager at MITA and editor of Malta Independent ICT feature
The Malta Independent ICT Feature
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he assortment of cool and functional apps available today is what makes our mobile phones more than just a phone. And have you ever wondered why the battery on your mobile devices sometimes drains in a matter of hours? In today’s feature we will look at a new study by AVG Technologies that uncovers some of top battery, data and
performance consuming apps on Android devices. This week we shall also look at how the majority of small businesses believe that having a mobile app would help them sell more and engage better with their customers. A new survey by Endurance International Group reveals the even though the majority are aware of such benefits, yet most of them do not have a mobile app for their
business. The survey reveals some of the reasons why businesses hesitate. Which is your favourite device to do your online shopping? Surprisingly, consumers across the globe seem to have different trends on which device they prefer using. People in the U.K for example prefer using their phone, whilst both in Australia and the U.S they prefer using their desktop computer. The sur-
vey conducted by OHT-Mobile also shows that m-commerce (mobile commerce) is catching up with e-commerce. All ICT Features are available on www.mita.gov.mt/ictfeature
Games, music and shopping apps hit smartphones hardest
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usic lovers, smartphone shoppers and mobile gamers around the world could find that their favourite apps are the ones eating up most of their battery life, data plan and phone storage. The results of the latest app performance research (covering Q4 of 2014) from AVG Technologies, N.V. an online security company, rank the popular music streaming service Spotify, new games like Deer Hunter 2014, and even the Amazon shopping app as among the most resource hungry apps globally. The quarterly AVG Android App Performance Report analyses aggregated, anonymous data from over one million AVG Android app users to discover the top performance-affecting apps worldwide. Installed on over 600,000 devices across AVG’s user base, popular Spotify has moved up two places from where AVG had ranked it in Q3 to take second position behind the social networking app from Facebook, whose constant background notification checks still have the greatest impact on overall Android device performance, consistent with last quarter’s findings. There were also four major new trends among AVG users, as identified in the latest report:
proving your phone experience, were in fact impacting it quite heavily. This is not something most people would expect so we hope our report will encourage people to understand how to manage their apps to prevent them impacting negatively on their favourite mo-
1 Game On: demonstrating the ever-changing gaming landscape, last quarter’s gaming chart toppers, FarmVille and Puzzle & Dragons, showed major declines in their installed user base, contributing to the reason they dropped out of the AVG Q4 performance rankings. They are replaced by new entrants, Boom Beach for overall impact and Deer Hunter 2014 for storage consumption. 2 Seasonal Shopping Fever: over the holiday shopping and sales period, the official Amazon for Android app entered the charts this quarter, ranked number five in the top 10 list of most allround resource-consuming apps. 3 Home Cinema Gets Smart: previously listed in the top three battery draining apps, Netflix this
quarter no longer appears in the tables at all following a November update that has resulted in significantly less battery drain. Good news for film fans! 4 Helping Hands that Hinder: tools like Clean Master or background apps like Samsung’s Security Policies designed to help keep smartphones secure and smooth, actually rank among the highest drainers of battery, storage and data plan. “In this quarter’s app report we saw some expected seasonal changes in the app landscape, such as uplift in usage of social, purchasing and GPS-based location apps,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Chief Technology Officer, AVG Technologies. “What surprised us, however, was that some of those tools and security updates aimed at im-
bile past-times.” The full report, which breaks down the performance impact further according to battery drain, storage consumption and data traffic, can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/1awqmTU