Mobile is the Hot Medium For Commerce

Shoppers spent well over $30 billion online over this past holiday season and a large percentage of that was done via mobile devices. Often consumers will finalize online purchases via their desktop or laptop computer, but a rapidly expanding number are using mobile applications or mobile web sites while in-store and those shoppers are driving the future of mobile application commerce.

New surveys from GfKRoper and SapientNitro state that a whopping 80% of smartphone owners used their mobile devices while shopping during the 2012 holiday season.  This is very solid growth for mobile shopping when compared to the past.

Other findings from these surveys include: 80% of mobile users accessed mobile applications or websites to research or browse products (15% higher than last year), 74% of mobile users completed at least one purchase via mobile device over the holidays (19% higher than the previous year) and  56% of mobile users looked to customer reviews and ratings to make a purchase decisions  (16% higher than last year).

Motorola’s research suggests that younger shoppers are the most likely to use mobile devices for shopping and that only about a third of older consumers use mobile devices to shop. Their survey data indicates some of the reason behind the growth of mobile applications usage for commerce, suggesting that users often feel that they have a better chance of finding reliable information via mobile app or mobile web site than via retail employees.

Recently comScore release survey data that smartphones are now used by 55% of mobile users in Europe and by 52% of people in the United States. This works out to be over 121 million users and about half of those people reported using mobile browsers or downloading apps for a formidable market that is growing on a daily basis.