Black Friday Is Golden for PayPal, Mobile Payments
With bellies satiated with turkey, Americans turned to another Thanksgiving weekend tradition: buying stuff with their cell phones on Black Friday.
Yes, you read that right. We’ll look back at Black Friday 2010 as the day mobile commerce came of age. Look no further than PayPal for evidence. From Techcrunch:
eBay-owned PayPal reported a 27 percent increase in total payment volume on Black Friday 2010, compared to the previous year. Generally, PayPal saw an approximately 310 percent increase in mobile shopping on Black Friday.Black Friday 2010 resulted in 21 percent more total payment volume compared to Thanksgiving 2010 and 19 percent more payment volume compared to an average Friday in 2010.These results are definitely representative of a larger trend considering that PayPal processes 16.5 percent of U.S. eCommerce and 15 percent of global eCommerce.
And this is before the newly christened “Cyber Monday,” when droves of Americans use their office computers to shop, shop, shop online.
There is a caveat to these PayPal numbers, however. PayPal does not reveal its actual transaction volume, so it is impossible to determine the base amount of mobile payment activity in 2009.
This does not diminish the fact that financial commerce is shifting to mobile devices. Data company Nielsen, for example, recently quantified the growth of mobile banking.
While mobile access penetration is lower than other channels, it has grown almost 14% from 11.6% in Q1 2010, while call center access has remained relatively flat quarter-over-quarter.
Some data:
And at what rate are consumers not just in the US, but globally, adopting mobile banking? Try a notable rate.
It is easy to fall for these kinds of forecasts. Heck, Juniper was one of the great purveyors of internet-growth lies in the late 1990s. But, as an indicator, these numbers work. And when you couple them with Black Friday statistics, you can make this statement: as mobile commerce grows, so too will mobile banking. And mobile commerce took a big step forward on Black Friday.
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