Marks & Spencer announces m-commerce success

Monday, October 4, 2010 - 14:36 by Paul Tissington

High street retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) has said that its mobile website, which has been handling m-commerce transactions since it launched in May of this year, is a roaring success.

In the few months since its debut the site has had 1.2 million unique visitors and some customers have used their mobiles to make individual orders, for which the total spend has been over £3000. This shows that M&S customers are convinced that the firm can offer secure, safe shopping online on the mobile platform.

The total number of page views recorded so far for the M&S m-commerce site is in excess of 10 million and a spokesperson said that the initial performance of the site had been far better than it had predicted, with 13,000 orders made from mobiles.

The majority of customers who visit the mobile site and make orders are using one of the Apple iPhone models, according to M&S. Second in the charts were Android-based smartphones, running the Google operating system.

Marks & Spencer's Sienne Veit said that the mobile site was designed to provide speedy, convenient and safe shopping online to customers. She said that eventually the experience of shopping with M&S would be unified across various platforms, whether on a desktop PC, mobile phone or in the high street stores.

One customer who bought two sofas using the mobile site managed to make the biggest m-commerce purchase yet back in August.

M&S has been partnering with Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) in order to provide an m-commerce experience which is at the forefront of this developing market.

MIG's Tim Dunn said that mainstream chains were beginning to see m-commerce as the frontier of retail and, as such, a greater emphasis is being put on adding new features and tweaking mobile sites to make them even better.