Mobile, Web Commerce Use Drastically-Different Payment Methods

A study by ShopVisible suggests mobile payments use different methods than online payments.

Some 67 percent of customers used PayPal or an alternative payment method when buying something from their mobile, while 33 percent paid by credit card, a ShopVisible study of 23,000 transactions has found.

For Web transactions over the same period, the results were reversed, the study found. Some 62 percent of buyers paid by credit card, 12.9 percent by Amazon Payments, 8.1 used Google Checkout, and just 16.8 percent used PayPal.

It might be too early to extrapolate too much from the results. It probably remains the case that mobile shopping is for different products than online shopping.

It might be that a typical transaction amount is significant enough to influence the choice of payment method.

There could be other reasons why credit cards make sense for PC-based shopping. Perhaps entering a long string of credit card numbers is viewed as a feasible and convenient operation on a PC and not so much on a mobile, leading to a preference for payment methods that do not require such operations.