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New Adobe Mobile Retail Research Appears to Be Flaky

New Adobe Mobile Retail Research Appears to Be Flaky

The research is also at odds with Price Waterhouse Coopers Research and research from The Iconic one of Australia’s largest online retail operations. 

This is the same software Company that this time last year was defending their reputation after a major data leak that saw 150 million people affected by a loss of customer data which was over 20 times more than the company admitted in its initial statement to the media. 

 It’s since been revealed that Adobe made two other serious errors when storing the data. Firstly, it encrypted all the passwords with the same key; secondly, the encryption used a method which renders the encrypted data insecure.

Now Adobe is claiming that Australian shoppers will reach for their smartphones when Click Frenzy run another of their online promotions later this week. The Melbourne based Company claim that Australians will spend $189 million in just 24 hours.

What Adobe is basing their research on is data collected for their annual Adobe Digital Index Holiday Shopping Predictions report.

The questionable research is according to Adobe executives based on billions of retail transactions from around the world which they claim reveals that Australians’ love of shopping on their smartphones is just behind Japan, Ireland and the USA. 

Adobe claim that by the end of the year, some 8% of all online sales in Australia are predicted to be conducted via mobile phones. 

They claim that transactions from 5,000 retailers have been researched but refuse to name which retailers in Australia have contributed to their research.

They also claim that their Marketing Cloud data has been used as the basis of their data.

The Adobe research is at odds with research from JB Hi Fi and Dick Smith who are already getting over 20% of their customers placing orders from mobile devices.

At Xmas 2013 more than 30% of Australians placed orders with Dick Smith and JB Hi Fi from mass retailers from a mobile device.  

Adam Jacobs at The Iconic web site, one of Australia’s largest online operations, claims that 50 per cent of their traffic is now through their mobile site and the other 50 % through desktop.
 
He said “I think the important thing to note here is probably not what the split is today but what it’s going to look like tomorrow and very soon. You know it was only 12 months ago that that split was more 70/30 towards desktop, now it’s 50/50. And in a year’s time it’s going to be 70 per cent in the other direction, towards mobile traffic”.

He said that important message for them is to really focus on imagery, and that their digital teams have worked hard on delivering very high quality imagery across their app and on their mobile site to really engage the user, as opposed to information heavy content, such as lots of text, which you might put on a website.
Price Waterhouse Coopers said following a recent study of 15,000 ‘always on’ customers that 43% of respondents indicated that they preferred using mobile devices to buy online (compared to only 30% in 2013).

They said that this further cements the rise of a new ‘mobile’ world order where 41% of respondents will use a tablet or mobile smartphone to shop online this Xmas, this is up from 28% in 2012.

Paul Robson, Adobe Asia-Pacific president, said the emergence of mobile as a shopping hub for Australians was the result of the improved capabilities of phones and retailers needed to keep pace with consumer expectations.

“This year we expect to see online spending grow by more than 15 percent in Australia,” said Robson. “As a percentage of total annual online sales, spending by Australians will be ahead of countries such as China, Canada, the UK and Germany.

“As smartphone screens become bigger and mobile data connections improve, it’s imperative that retailers now offer the very best experience on phones.”

The research found that the ease of use of mobile payment tools, such as PayPal and – at this stage only in the USA – Apple Pay, is also giving consumers greater confidence when buying through their phones and tablets.