The mobile channel is booming and reaching a tipping point. Mobile online commerce has enjoyed triple digit growth rates for consecutive years while mobile wallets are gaining traction for payments at the point-of-sale. On December 9, 2012 eBay recorded their largest mobile shopping day ever as eBay purchases made via mobile devices grew 133 percent from their largest mobile shopping day of 2011. The second Sunday in December is a major holiday shopping day, and PayPal’s mobile payment volume on this day was 221 percent higher than the second Sunday of December in 2011 while the number of consumer’s using PayPal Mobile increased 204 percent on this day in 2012. With mobile commerce volumes growing at such rapid rates it is evident that many more merchants were equipped to accept payments made via mobile devices in 2012, but this is primarily larger merchants as the Mobile Survey 2012, conducted by Kount, The Fraud Practice and CardNotPresent.com, reveals that many SMB merchants are planning support for mobile developments for 2013 but don’t support it currently. While there seemed to be universal agreement that mobile is important and is only going to get bigger, there was not universal agreement on the fraud risk associated with the channel. In fact, the survey indicates that many merchants may not be sufficiently prepared for mobile commerce fraud risks.
As shown in the Mobile Survey 2012, 39 percent of merchants with annual sales below $5 million were currently supporting the mobile channel in 2012 while about 50 percent have plans to support it in 2013 and 10 percent have no plans for mobile. About 45 percent of merchants with annual revenues between $5 and $10 million supported the mobile channel in 2012 while an additional 45 percent have plans to support mobile in 2013 and only 5 percent had no plans for supporting mobile. Merchants with $10 million or more in annual sales were more likely to support the mobile channel in 2012 than not support it with more having plans to add mobile support in 2013. For the largest merchants, those with revenues greater than $50 million, 70 percent were actively supporting mobile in 2012.
When it comes to the mobile channel and fraud, however, merchants may not be entirely prepared. For example, 79 percent of merchants indicate that being able to recognize transactions coming from a mobile a device is important with 35 percent stating that this is very important, although less than half of merchants are actually able to recognize when a transaction is originating from a mobile device today. Additionally, organizations were asked what they thought the biggest obstacles would be for mobile adoption, and a low percentage of merchants were concerned with managing fraud risk. Only 17 percent of merchants consider consumer security concerns the biggest obstacle to mobile adoption and only 8 percent consider addressing how to manage fraud risk the biggest obstacle. Managing fraud risk is a much greater concern amongst other industry players has 77 percent of card issuers, 50 percent of card associations and 29 percent of acquirers consider this the biggest obstacle to mobile adoption.
These findings and many more are further elaborated in the free Mobile Survey 2012 white paper which can be requested here. The survey covers many other factors related to mobile commerce including mobile sales, mobile payment preferences, regional priorities for mobile efforts, the most effective mobile fraud prevention tools as well as the mobile fraud prevention tools used today and the ones organizations plan to use in 2013.
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