Financial Times Cites Online Sales Growth #'s

As we work to deliver our online and mobile payment processing system we take heart in numbers like those cited by the Financial Times in a recent article.

According to the article:

"Raul Vazquez, chief executive of Walmart.com, said the retailer had seen sales on the Friday after Thanksgiving holiday “exceed our expectations” of 40-60 per cent annual growth.

Ron LaPierre, president of PriceGrabber, a comparison shopping site, said sales through its site had been running “at or above expectations” so far."

The article goes on to state that WalMart is expecting 30 million visitors this week, and the top ecommerce sites are running similar promotions to the "door busters" run in brick and mortar stores. They are adding, this season, free delivery offers to drive more online sales.

More to come...

Black Monday Review

It's been more than a week since the lost blog post. I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving and please excuse the tardiness of this post. We at Mpayy are speeding forward to completion of our site and moving to User Acceptance Testing and our late January 2008 launch.

The Importance of Scalability

One of the beauties of the platform being launched at Mpayy is the application's scalability. Leveraging onto the bank's infrastructure, we are prepared to handle millions of consumers' online transactions simultaneously. Once consumers get a test, they'll be itching for it, and after yesterday's experience shopping on "Cyber Monday", merchants will likely be ready as well.

Our good friends at Internet Retailer reported two stories that caught our eye.

First, Comscore reported ecommerce transaction times that spiked due to volume. "While none of the sites suffered shutdowns, many experienced extended checkout times of up to two minutes." These sites, and the connections to their payment processors slowed signifcantly, and underlines the importance of multiple payment options and the investment in the Checkout processes.

Internet Retailer also reported that 40,000 Yahoo store merchants were unable to process payments yesterday. Here again, one would expect Yahoo to have capacity models out the wazoo so that such an important day of selling was not lost, but this does not seem to have happened.

Internet Retailer quoted Kevin Hickey,

"Kevin Hickey, vice president of marketing at New Stanton, PA-based OnlineStores.com, which operates several sites on the Yahoo Store platform including EnglishTeaStore.com and United-States-Flag.com, says his company lost about $35,000 in expected sales yesterday as it was able to take in only 20% of its usual volume on the phone and in sporadic online orders.

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo wasn’t up to its normal level of reliability yesterday,” Hickey says. “It might spur us into looking into alternate platforms and to have a redundant back-up system for taking orders.” "

Holiday Shopping Paves the Way for Mpayy

Mpayy headquarters remains very focused on putting the finishing touches on the application and web and mobile sites for launch in late January. So, we will sit through the period in which traditional retailers generate up to 80% of their annual sales - the timeframe between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Today we review holiday spending predictions and a new retailer effort that is ahead of the curve.

Predictions for Holiday Spending

Internet Retailer just reviewed a recent Forrester Research article entitled “Outlook for U.S. Online Retail: Holiday 2007.”

In it, Forrester's predicts that ONLINE spending will grow $6 billion to $33 billion this holiday season. IR goes on to cite Burst Media arguing that more than half (50.7%) of consumers will do some holiday shopping online, up from the mid-30%'s last year.

The Internet Retailer closes with some interesting customer sentiments that pave the way for Mpayy.

— 70.7% of online shoppers cite credit card security as the biggest impediment to buying online. Other concerns are the privacy of personal information online, cited by 60.8%; shipping costs

Mpayy will be PCI Compliant and utilize 128-bit TDES encryption technology to protect customer data vs. the retailers doing it themselves.

Mobile Touchpoints

Both the Internet Retailer and the Wall Street Journal point to concerns about the economy, housing market and gas prices as influences that will constrain consumer spending this holiday season. In order to combat those factors, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) notes several high-flying retailers are taking specific steps:

"Shoppers who sign up with Nordstrom or Wal-Mart, for example, will receive text messages with information on discounted merchandise and special sales. Best Buy is offering gift suggestions on its mobile Web site. J.C. Penney is going further, offering to make wake-up calls to early-bird shoppers eager to get a head start on Black Friday, the traditional kickoff to the frenzied holiday retail season. (This year, many J.C. Penney stores will open at 4 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving.)"

These retailers are looking to open up the mobile marketing channel. Currently, most efforts are just informative, or include a coupon system that can be redeemed for discounts in the store. However, little to no mobile action is, well... actionable. Mpayy will drive mobile commerce through actionable text messaging. We look forward to rolling out pilots with close friends of the company at Interactive Mediums.