Global Marketing News – 20th August 2015
Search engine triumphs over Uber in taxi market
The Russian search giant Yandex has seen its taxi app revenues triple in the last year.
Yandex Taxi allows users to book taxis online or through an app, with the location of the taxi then being tracked online so that users can see its progress.
Its fleet comprises of over 15,000 taxis operating in the Moscow area, making it the dominant firm in the Russian taxi app market.
Its rivals Gett and Uber lag far behind in terms of numbers of both taxis and users.
Yandex is hoping that its taxi app revenues will reduce its reliance on its online advertising revenues, which currently make up 90% of the company’s income.
Its investment in Yandex Taxi app seems to be paying off, with Yandex saying that the majority of its non-advertising revenue is coming from the app and that the amount of money it generated tripled in the last year alone.
Yandex is most well-known for its search engine, which is the most popular in Russia with a market share of around 60%.
Amazon cross-border ecommerce booming in China
The global online ecommerce site Amazon has reported that cross-border ecommerce sales out of China have doubled in the first half of this year alone.
Chinese merchants are able to sell their products to customers in 185 countries through Amazon’s Global Selling platform.
Chinese exports generated a staggering 51 billion US dollars last year, an increase of 44%. The latest figures showing a 100% increase in the 6 months of this year alone show that cross-border ecommerce in China is quickly hotting up.
Amazon faces stiff competition in the Chinese ecommerce market, however, with local giants Alibaba and JD being the dominant ecommerce sites in the country.
Samsung Pay launches in South Korea
Samsung is launching its own mobile payment system Samsung Pay in South Korea today.
It is also due to be launched in China, the US, the UK and Spain later this year.
Samsung Pay allows users to pay for items using their Samsung smartphone. Users must put their card details onto their smartphone, and will then be able to hold their phone near a shop’s payment terminal, select the card they want o pay with, and authorise the payment with their fingerprint.
Samsung will not make any profits from Samsung Pay directly, but hopes that it will be appealing enough to convince users to buy a Samsung smartphone.
It will face tough competition in the mature South Korean mobile payments market, where rivals Naver Pay, BankWalletKakao and KakaoPay are already well-established.
Internationally, it will also have to compete with other mobile payment systems including Apple Pay and Android Pay.
New B2B ecommerce site launches in the Netherlands
A new B2B ecommerce platform called WeMarket has launched in the Netherlands.
125 sellers have already created accounts on WeMarket, including big name companies such as Phillips and T-Mobile.
WeMarket connects businesses with global suppliers selling surplus, returned or used items.
Sellers can a listing for each item they are selling, and can upload as many images as they want.
Buyers can search for items, with results being ordered according to geographic location, past search behaviour and profile information.
Users can swap invoices on the platform, but must do the actual payment elsewhere, as WeMarket does not currently have an integrated payment platform.
EU orders new payment security measures
And finally, companies that handle payments from European customers must comply with EU payment security measures.
Online fraud costs the EU around 1.5 billion Euros per year, so at the end of 2014 the European Banking Authority issued orders to payment service providers to improve their online security measures.
A key recommendation is two-step verification, which means that users must provide two pieces of information that only they should know in order to complete a payment.
It also recommends against the use of iframes on websites, saying that a full redirect from the seller’s website to the payment service provider’s website is preferable.
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Cal O'Connell
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