Now that’s what we call a prospective growth market.
A new report published Tuesday from Juniper Research estimates that the annual transaction value of online, mobile and contactless payments will reach $4.7 trillion by 2019.
Putting it in perspective, that’s up from just over $2.5 trillion for 2014.
The report observed that the largest net increase in spend would occur through remote physical goods purchases. It highlighted the dramatic surge in activity in emerging markets such as China, with the online retailer Alibaba accounting for 20% of global B2C (business to consumer) and C2C (consumer to consumer) eRetail worldwide in 2013.
“However,” Juniper explains, “while there was organic growth in the overall transaction levels due to increased purchasing on tablets and mobile, a significant proportion of tablet usage represented migration from desktop activity.”
Combined transactions on mobile handsets and tablets are on pace to exceed those on desktops and laptops for the first time this year.
Finally, the report concluded that there was accelerating migration from physical format (DVD, CD) to digital (stream, download) across all core content sectors. These included a marked trend towards VOD (Video On Demand) from players such as Lovefilm and Netflix at the expense of DVD, with online VOD services in commercial deployment in most European markets.
“With the ease provided by mobile apps and wireless Internet, things like checks and mechanical registers are starting to seem like dinosaurs,” explains mobile payments company PayAnywhere on their official company blog. “Mobile solutions allow retailers to accept payments at storefronts via readers that attach to smartphones and tablets. With the addition of data analytics and promotional tools, the vast benefits of mobile are drawing thousands of new converts each month. As more and more merchants adopt mobile readers for credit card processing, consumers by and large are coming to favor the option.”
