In Africa, the majority of people use mobile devices as their exclusive Internet connection gateways.
Mobile e-commerce in Africa is about forgetting about the top 10% of the population and focusing on the other 90%, said Vincent Maher, chief product officer at mobile social network, Mxit, during his presentation at the South African eCommerce Conference in Sandton this week.
Discussing what he described as different flavours of mobile commerce, Maher mentioned that digital goods and airtime purchases via mobile channels are popular in Africa. "Everyone has a SIM card, some of us have more than one SIM card. In fact, there are more SIM cards than people in this country - and some people don't even own phones."
While this proves an attractive option in a feature-phone-heavy market, the catch is that a high percentage of the transaction cost falls on the operator, said Maher. As a consequence, businesses can only really sell digital goods - which have no intrinsic value - in this way, he added.
In order to get mobile e-commerce right, online retailers need to put themselves in the headspace of this group of people and "create something that will delight them". Mobile development is often focused on catering to top-end customers, but in doing so, businesses are essentially ignoring a huge portion of the market, said Maher. "Product development must be done from the perspective of the user."
Customising offerings can be tricky in the mobile arena because of the fragmented nature of the market, noted Maher. "Tailoring your product to be functional across various handsets is challenging," he said. "The mobile market is a mass market, particularly the feature phone market, and a lack of customer insights and skills makes catering to all the different groups in this market very complicated."
For Maher, one of the best ways to find out what consumers want is to engage with them and talk to them about what they like and dislike. Mobile development teams should be trained to conduct useful research about different societal groups and should be encouraged to build products for the people, he stressed.
"When switching to mobile, you must know what you are doing," concluded Maher. "Yes, it probably will be quite tough in the beginning, but the reward at the end of all the effort is that you will have a market that is three times bigger than the one you have now."
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