There are two mainstreams of the recent trend in the commerce industry.
One is the rapid growth of the mobile commerce. According to the report from Korea On-Line Shopping Association, the total sales of the mobile commerce is forecasted as below:
[ Mobile Commerce Market Forecast(Unit: KRW in billion) ]
Considering that the total number of mobile commerce users will be 10 million by this year in Korea, a sharply increasing phase will continue. And SK Telecom, the number one telecommunication company, launched the first mobile commerce shop based on NFC and QR code scanning in February. From last year, many distributors created their own mobile shopping applications and mobile web services. Though a quantitative growth is going on, there is no improvement in the convenience for customers. As the number of total mobile shopping services increases, consumers are confused on how to approach those sites and deal with it efficiently.
The second is the fact that social shopping is positioned as a common method for economic shopping. The market size is anticipated to increase from KRW 60 billion last year to KRW 300 billion(approximately USD 270 million) this year. And the total number of social shopping companies has reached 195 within a year. Furthermore, Groupon Korea has launched its service from April 1st. As it gets more difficult for consumers to pick up a good deal from these services, Daum, the second largest search engine in Korea, proposed the social gateway for social shopping services.
There are many web sites including social services. At the same time there are many gateway services providing price-comparison and consumer opinions. But the mobile market has not enough such services. It means there are new opportunities to obtain customer power by taking an intermediary position between a seller and a buyer.
Marketing Tool Type
Shopkick is one of applications which gives marketing tools to proprietors. The service tries to make a partnership with distributors and shop owners which have an interest on these efficient marketing and promotional method. While Shopkick provides its information and function to customers of partnered companies, the company gathers users and utilize from this customer base.
Open Customer Type
Shopsavvy, and other mobile search services are major examples of open customer typed applications. This kind of gateway services focus on the product information itself such as price, the location of a shop and a consumer’s opinion. Normally information-concentrated services collect DB themselves via a search engine or other methods.
Agent Type
This business model is considered as a mobile wallet. A mobile agent contains most of the data about a subscriber and analyzes those information to recommend products. It can get a more probable usage pattern by accompanying with a mobile wallet without any active participation such as turning on a program(Shopkick) or scanning a bar-code. It just mirrors consumer information and helps them to take a reasonable and useful decision. Some shopping applications include this self-offering function.
Regardless of whether three types of services will grab the opportunity of a shopping gateway, these services are needed to enhance a user interface for mobile environment. A consumer really wants the moderate information amongst the flood of data.