Sprint, The US carrier, has teamed up with an online ’shop front ‘ mshopper, in what provides an intriguing glimpse into the future use of cellphones.
Sprint customers can use their phones to do online shopping through the above portal. At the moment they have a choice of about 7 million products from 30 retailers, which, according to the Reuters report, includes Wal-Mart. In any event, I guess the number of stores and who they are will grow over time.
What is particularly interesting is how people use the service. Basically someone pre-registers their address and credit card details on the system and when they come to want to buy a product, all they have to do in key in their phone number and a pin code and they’ve bought it.
mshopper also market the system as an opportunity for people to check in store prices against online prices whilst physically shopping - the real drawback to this is instant gratification or the lack of it i.e. if you’re shopping somewhere, check a price, see its cheaper online (which is normally intentional and quite often a selling point by the store) and assuming the store won’t lower its price, you’re then left with the choice of buying it online and waiting for it to be delivered or paying for it at the time , knowing you could have got it cheaper online !
The real significance of this is the ease with which people will be able to buy things (assuming they want to! ). One of the reasons for the rise in the use of credit cards is because people often don’t really think of it as spending money when they use a card - its in the future, it isn’t physically money etc, which means they probably spend more than they would do if it were simply cash.
This takes the process effectively one stage further whereby all you do is tap a load of numbers into your phone, which you do all day anyway, and hey presto its yours ! - Its not like it pre-loads all your credit and/or credit card details which you then confirm - there is no showing you that you’re actually spending money and your mindset is much more likely to be that yes you’re spending money, but not really! - that’s the attraction from a business point of view and the danger from a customer one !
Jupiter Research reckons the North American consumer will be spending $1.9 billion online by 2010 !
