Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By John Stewart
@DTPaymentNews
Ever since the advent of mobile shopping, experts have cautioned that spending in the new channel would be hampered by small screens and clunky interfaces. Now, though, relatively new technology like natural-language interfaces and so-called bots may be coming to the rescue.
A new study released Tuesday by Juniper Research indicates such technology will help drive remote mobile purchases of physical and digital goods to $2.1 trillion globally by 2021.That’s a doubling of the total mobile purchase volume expected this year, the U.K.-based firm says.
Juniper says increasing consumer use of mobile phones for shopping is leading merchants to invest in new technology to make it easier and faster for users to find and buy what they’re looking for. It’s also transforming the way payment gateways approach mobile transactions, the firm says.
The study says consumers are put off by merchants using traditional systems such as keyword search and menu-driven systems. In reaction, merchants are expected to integrate what Juniper calls “conversational interfaces,” including bots and natural-language search. Bots are software programs or “robots” that act as agents for users to run repetitive tasks and speed up service. The technology is designed to quickly sniff out a consumer’s intent and find items that meet it.
According to Juniper, examples include The North Face, whose site includes an intelligent digital assistant programmed to help consumers find the right product. Facebook, Google, and online marketplace Etsy are “investing heavily” in this technology, the firm says.
“Offering a conversational consumer interface, then marrying intent with contextual product data, will drive merchant differentiation,” says Steffen Sorrell, author of the research, in a statement.
Newer payment gateways are also reacting to the trend, Juniper notes, by replacing “frustrating checkouts” with improved interfaces. Examples it cites include Klarna, a company based in Sweden that launched its U.S. service last year, and Adyen, a Netherlands-based service that also has a major stake in U.S. online and mobile commerce.
Rather than require shoppers to enter card numbers, user names, and passwords, Klarna asks for “simple-to-remember information,” Juniper says, such as an email address or postal code. At the same time, Adyen is using machine-learning technology reduce instances of payment declines owing to bad formatting or misrouted links to acquirers.
The trend toward streamlined mobile checkout could especially fuel usage of what Juniper calls the “OS-Pay” mobile wallets, Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay and Alphabet Inc.’s Android Pay, which allow a wide selection of payment methods and offer biometric authentication.
In research released in August, the firm projected the two services worldwide would account for $8 billion in volume annually by 2018, up from $540 million this year.
