"South African consumers are driving a mobile transacting revolution enabled by a slew of innovative home grown technology companies. Local retailers, brands and agencies are leveraging the power of mobile transactions in clever ways to unlock new revenue streams and boost customer retention," says Bevan Ducasse, CEO of wiGroup.
According to the 2013 GSM African Mobile Observatory report, South Africa has just under 60 million mobile phones in use today. "In a population of only 50 million people, it's reasonably safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of South Africans own a mobile phone. With the explosion of mobile transaction services and apps and the increasing affordability of smartphones, the challenge today is how retailers can tap into the vast potential for additional revenue, customer retention and innovative marketing campaigns offered by mobile transactions."
He says recent success in mobile payment adoption in other markets has been encouraging. "US coffee chain Starbucks developed a mobile payment app that processed $1-billion in transactions in 2013 alone. In China, the value of all mobile payments in 2013 came to $1.6-trillion, a more than 200% increase on the year before. While Africa has traditionally led the adoption of mobile payments and mobile money transfer, clearly the more developed markets are catching on."
One of the key challenges of driving adoption of in-store mobile transacting has been a lack of uniformity. "There's currently no one wallet or application that can do it all and we don't expect there to really ever be one. The reality is a complex and ever-evolving ecosystem that includes customers, retailers, brands, agencies, banks, mobile networks and local and international app developers. It's this interplay between these disparate groups that is producing some exciting possibilities for the mobile transacting space in South Africa."
The company's open and interoperable, point-of-sale (POS) integrated mobile transaction platform has lowered the barriers to entry for retailers, brands and agencies wishing to add a mobile transacting component to their sales and marketing campaigns.
"In-store mobile transacting includes mobile vouchers, coupons, loyalty and rewards programmes and direct payments and money transfers. One of the great benefits of a single platform is that all your knowledge from one campaign can easily be applied to the next, meaning you stand to improve on redemption rates, customer retention and sales figures during every single campaign. This really leaves marketers and strategists to focus on developing innovative campaigns and new revenue streams that hand them a competitive advantage over other brands."
He does warn that the success of any in-store mobile transacting campaign is not only reliant on the technology. "Retailers must ensure that the operations team - including individual store managers - are fully briefed and on board, and that till staff understand how the technology and campaign mechanics work. As we have seen with some of our brands and agency clients, customer education also plays a vital role; for this, in-store education campaigns work best. Whatever you do, make it as simple as possible for consumers: if you confuse them, chances are your campaign will fail to achieve its objectives," he concludes.
Download a a copy of the "In-Store Mobile Transacting: A Playbook for Retailers".
