Spending on mobile devices has reached an all time high of half a million pounds per day.

Daily deal aggregator Bownty has seen a 25% increase in mobile-based spending between January and June this year. 40% of all transactions through Bownty now come from a mobile platform, compared to a third in January.

Total spending from Britons has hit £500,000 per day on daily deals, varying from restaurant vouchers to beauty treatments. Some suggest that the amounts being spent through mobile devices and tablets are mainly down to the ever-rising number of people now using the devices as an everyday item; the amounts being spent are migrating from other methods of payment such as visiting stores and website purchases.

Another suggestion is that as mobile devices are instantaneous, part of the spending is down to impulse buying and not wanting to wait to purchase a deal before they get home. Add into this that mobile advertising has seen heavy input from firms in the last few years, and the platform becomes something habitually used and normalised, therefore consumers accept it as another way to pay.

Steffen Frouland, CEO of Bownty said “This rapid growth shows more and more consumers are willing to spend money through their mobile devices, with shopping on the move becoming a reality. With the number of UK smartphone users set to continue to rise, we expect mobile transactions to overtake desktop spending before the end of the year”.

Britain seems to have seen a shift in spending from more traditional methods to mobile payments. More and more retailers are launching product-specific mobile apps to assist with purchases for their own products. Major retailers such as Amazon, eBay and even Domino’s now support payment through mobile apps, meaning it’s possible to pay for everything from the latest bestseller to take-away pizza.

As consumers trust their mobile devices more, acceptance grows and this widens the field of items that people are willing to purchase through the platform.

It’s worth remembering that one of the major draws for new methods of payment is the convenience of being able to pay anytime, any place, anywhere. Designers of mobile payments usually strive to balance ease of payment with the necessary level of security in order to make customers happy with making financial transactions through a smartphone.

If possible, mobile payments are designed to be one-click affairs, which try to make payments as fast as possible. This has many benefits for the retailer, maximising impulse buying, cutting down the amount of staff hours spent in processing payments, reducing overheads in physical stores and allowing customers to choose their preferred method of interacting with a company. The benefit of designers aiming to make payments a secure, but ideally a ‘one-click’ affair is that they quickly become accepted as ‘normal’ beyond a hardcore of users who like to keep up with ‘the latest thing’.

For retailers, the increase in mobile payments represents an important next step; this is not necessarily the be-all-and-end-all of online transactions, but shows an important diversification where fast, mobile payments are supported by traditional, in-depth customer service.

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