July 4, 2005
Maybe that dress really is calling to you
In Japan, a growing ranks of mobile phone shoppers, many of them women, are snapping up cosmetics, clothes, accessories and even food by ordering them with their mobile phones, write The Herald Tribune.
In fact, sales using mobile phones are one of the fastest-growing Internet businesses. Such revenue - excluding nonphysical goods like software, entertainment and travel services - reached ¥110 billion, or $992 million, in 2004, up from ¥58.6 billion in 2003.
Japanese people have a very close relationship to their cellphones. "Women in their 20s can enter faster on the cellular phone than on the PC," said Internet analyst Taku Nishikawa. Besides, the e-payment mechanisms built into some phones have eliminated the need to tap in credit card numbers.
Buyers on the move are often spurred into buying when they receive a sales pitch on their phone. "You are likely to read mails that arrive at your cellular phone" more than ones that come to your PC, explained Saori Uegaki, a stockbroker in Osaka.
The burst of activity in the mobile space has been a bonanza for companies like NetPrice, an Internet shopping company: 60% of its revenue comes from mobile commerce. NetPrice even applied a system in which the more people buy a certain product, the cheaper it becomes, with minute-by-minute announcements of how many buyers it has drawn and where the price stands.
Yahoo Japan's new cellphone site with Index is intended to offer the same goods sold on the PC-based Yahoo Shopping site. Other Internet players are also betting on the mobile market. Sales of goods at the Rakuten Internet shopping mall have been growing by 60 percent to 70 percent annually. But sales via cellphone have been rising by 100 percent to 200 percent a year since late 2003.
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