Mobile Commerce

It’s taken about a year, but Dwolla Inc. has now executed a strategic shift away from handling online and mobile transactions directly for consumers who want to pay merchants and each other. Instead, the 8-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based company now focuses on selling programming to clients that want to process …

Shipping costs and the total price are two primary inhibitors for consumers shopping online, found a survey from FuturePay Inc., which provides financing for online purchases. Indeed, 86% of the 1,500 consumers surveyed in the fourth quarter cited the cost of shipping as the top reason they opted not to …

Retailers wondering about the role of smart phones in their stores might take this figure into account: 36% of U.S. shoppers purchase via a mobile device frequently, and consider it a part of their regular purchasing behavior. That’s the finding from a recent DMI Inc. survey. DMI is a Bethesda, …

Marketing campaigns delivered to shoppers’ smart phones have long been seen as a promising way to drive both in-store traffic and mobile payments, and during the recent holiday season one company ran a test to find out just what kind of results retailers could expect. Swirl Networks Inc., a 6-year-old …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has released an Android version of its Walmart Scan & Go self-checkout app that consumers use on their smart phones. This version joins the iOS app currently being tested at a single Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Ark., and could indicate consumers are increasingly embracing the self-checkout concept just …

Younger consumers are more likely to combine an in-store visit and online product research or purchases than their older counterparts. That’s one finding from the FutureBuystudy released Tuesday by GfK, a Germany-based research firm. The study, which examined U.S. consumer buying behavior, found that 46% of consumers between 18 and 26 …

Chatbot developer Kasisto Inc. has agreed to provide a so-called smartbot for Varo Money Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of a mobile-only banking app. Both the app and the bot are in beta testing and expected to launch early next year. The new bot, called Val, is based on conversational …

Consumers are making their shopping, and payments, preferences known this holiday season. They are spending 12% more on e-commerce purchases so far this shopping season than they did in 2015, reports comScore Inc. Consumers have made $49.3 billion in e-commerce purchases from Nov. 1 to Dec. 12 using a desktop computer at home …

Online commerce gets a lot of attention these days, but just how much of the retail economy in North America does it account for? The answer is 7%, according to a report released Tuesday by Boston-based researcher Aite Group. That’s accounting for all e-commerce sales as well as browser-based and …

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Pay mobile-payments service has added an order-ahead feature that relies on functionality developed by LevelUp, a Boston-based mobile-payments and mobile-loyalty company. The new feature is available today for Chase Pay users at quick-service restaurants in Boston and will be usable at QSRs nationwide in “coming …