‘Tis the season for online shopping and lots of it is happening on smartphones. Adobe predicts this will be the first time people buy more from their smartphones than from a computer, with 36% of e-commerce sales expected to be made on a smartphone. While it’s convenient to buy gifts this way, there are some risks involved that we don’t have to worry about when shopping the old-fashioned way. These are the downsides to smartphone spending and how to be smarter about doing it.
- Mobile sites don’t always include all the information you need -Research shows that many companies provide less info on the mobile-friendly versions of their websites, so you have to dig around more to get it. So you may want to double check a product on a computer before buying on your phone.
- Shopping with a mobile app can leave you vulnerable to fraudsters -Criminals are capitalizing on the mobile shopping trend by creating fake mobile apps to steal information from customers or install malware onto their devices, according to LifeLock. They advise only downloading apps from “reputable sources, such as Galaxy Apps, the App Store, Amazon App Store and Google Play,” to be safe.
- People who use mobile wallets spend more money -More and more people are storing their credit card info in mobile wallets or payment apps like Apple Pay and Wallet and Google Pay, but researchers have found they start spending more money that way. A study found the total amount people spent went up by more than 2% when they use mobile payments.
Source:Marketwatch