6 Major Stories About Millennials and Mobile Commerce: E-commerce Link Digest

Happy Friday, Big Thinkers. Not much setup this week. Just 6 major stories about Millennials and mobile commerce to carry you into next week. Have a great weekend, and, in the meantime, enjoy:

1. Lots and lots of payment news this past week, folks. For starters, 9to5Mac reports that Best Buy has added Apple Pay support in its app this past week, and will be in retail stores this fall. Mobile Commerce Daily says Best Buy’s move represents a setback to MCX. Well, sure. But to be fair, MCX (aka CurrentC), has always been a retail-driven product, not a customer-driven solution. While all this is going on, the “old timer” of online payments, PayPal, launched its instant checkout service “One Touch” across the web. Given how important mobile payments will be to e-commerce overall, (something I’ve talked about here, here, here, and here, y’know, once or twice), these are significant moves for the future. Expect a lot more on this next week here on the blog.
2. For one last point about mobile payments, eMarketer says that in mobile payment adoptions, Millennials lead. On that note, Marketing Charts asks “So How Many Millennials Are There in the US, Anyway?” The answer? A lot. You put that all together, and that’s why I think mobile commerce is here to stay.
3. We covered this in detail in this week’s podcast, but you owe it to yourself to check out this look at why Nike and Under Armour are spending wildly to watch your every step, and this Wired article on location is your most critical data, and everyone’s watching (as well as the podcast, as it happens). Why? Well, data from eMarketer suggests that marketers struggle to map multichannel customers’ journeys and, I strongly suspect this will be the major battleground amongst marketers for the next 5-10 years.
4. So, as for this data-driven battleground, another Wired article details how Uber says it can deliver food in NYC in 10 minutes. How are they doing it? Predictive analytics. Since it takes more than 10 minutes to, y’know, actually cook the food, Uber will use data to determine which foods to pre-order and pickup before participating restaurants’ customers do. Wow. Again, we’ll look at this in more detail in the coming weeks.
5. Last predictive analytics items for this week comes from Venture Beat, which unveils Facebook’s secret plan to kill Google and become the second trillion-dollar company in the process. So worth your time.
6. Finally, mobile plays a critical role in all driving this change by providing many companies with the data necessary as well as the tools consumers will use to access browse, find, and buy the things they need. And that’s why the coming mobile e-commerce backlash is wrong and why you need to ignore the big lie about mobile commerce everyone’s telling right now.

OK, I said there were only six stories this week. I didn’t say they were short stories. But they’re really worthwhile stories and I hope you’re able to put them to use in the days and weeks ahead.

While you’re at it, make sure to check out other entries from our E-commerce Link Digest series, including these 10 must-read e-commerce, search, and mobile posts, these 10 awesome e-commerce, mobile, and millennial marketing posts, a great look at 5-plus can’t miss mobile commerce and marketing posts from the past week, and these 6 quick e-commerce and digital marketing winners, as well as these “9 Amazing Millennial, Mobile and Digital Marketing Columns: the Top Posts from March” when you get a moment, too.

Do you want learn even more about how your customers’ changing behavior shapes e-commerce and marketing? Be sure an register to receive a special report I’ve produced in conjunction with hotel marketing firm Vizergy, “Digital Hotel Marketing in a Multiscreen World.” While it’s targeted specifically at hotel and resort marketers, the lessons apply to just about any business. You can get your free copy of the report here.

You can also check out these slides I had the pleasure of speaking to a great audience yesterday about how to lead digital transformation within large organizations (a topic we’ve been talking about a fair bit lately). Here are the slides for your reference:

And, finally, you might want to take a look at some of our past coverage of the e-commerce, mobile commerce, and digital marketing overall, including:

• 10 Key Posts about Millennials and Mobile: E-commerce Link Digest
• The Secrets Behind “It’s All E-commerce” for 2014
• The Zen of Digital Marketing Strategy
• 7 Steps to E-Commerce Heaven
• Today and Tomorrow: Mobile and The Changing Customer Journey
• Mobile Makes E-commerce Even More “Frictionless”
• Your 2014 Internet Marketing New Year’s Resolutions – Thinks Out Loud Episode 56