The Smartphone Grows Up
Who buys via smartphone?
If you imagine that the customers shopping from this small screen are mostly youngsters, you are missing the emerging trend in the e-commerce market. Smart phones are quickly becoming the focal point of the online shopping experience.
The adoption of smart phone shopping is widespread. Of the total number of mobile phones shipped last year, 73% were smartphones. At Rakuten, we are already feeling that impact – by the end of this year, we expect more than 40% of sales via our merchants will be conducted with a smartphone device.
And the demographics are not what you might imagine. As the use of smartphones continues to rise, the devices used for booking travel have changed markedly. When we examined the trends at Rakuten Travel, we noticed customers using their smartphones to book summer travel have increased 158.1%, but the most extraordinary growth was among women in their 50s and older, who have tripled their use of smartphones for booking since last summer.
This ushers in yet another era of change for e-commerce. No sooner have retailers adapted to the virtual world, now they must adapt to the mobile device. At Rakuten, we offer our merchants tools to design and run dedicated smart phone pages. Those that embrace these tools are selling four times more than their counterparts without a smart phone orientation.
Shoppers continue to take control of the commerce experience and are now saying they want to shop 24/7 from the palm of their hands. Smart retailers will follow the smart phone trend.
(Photo: Intel Free Press, Flickr)
Managing Executive at Adumo Online
9yThis is so true, in South Africa we are starting to see payments being made from both mobile devices and smartphones. Using our 2013 eCommerce Payments Index, where we analyzed our merchant data, we saw close to 14% of transactions coming from a mobile device. The smartphone contributed 4% of all transactions. We also saw an interesting trend with the ATV as the smartphone carried the smallest ATV. One of the factors is the emergence of spend on digital content. Interesting times!
Research Lead @ Intelpoint | Research | Data Storytelling | Mobile & African Tech
10ywe are already in the era of Mobile where there is almost a mobile application for everything, from travel ticketing to ordering food, locating places among others.
Head of Partnership Development at R.I.S.E UK (P/T) Business Owner - Kharina Kharran CPTSD & Trauma Coach. Life Coach/Author/Podcaster/Motivational Speaker.
10yThis is ultimately the way forward business need this as part of theirmobile business strategy -
Business Development Director @ Arcus Global | 14 Years serving Local Government | Passionate about positive change
10yI blogged about this in 2011 - Glad im ahead of the times... http://blog.rocktime.co.uk/2011/01/martin-shares-his-thoughts-on-mcommerce.html
Application Developer at IBM
10yIdunno ... I shop almost exclusively from my tablet. In fact, I can't recall when I shopped from another device last time. Are you sure you're not mixing smartphones with tablets, due to similar OSes? Background of my question: a phone's screen is too small to allow proper research and comparison of alternatives, therefore I'd rather shop from a notebook or a desktop than from a phone. One more thing: on a 10" tablet, I absolutely hate it when I have to use a crippled version of the site a desktop user sees. There's a reason I got myself a large screen, high resolution tablet, and it's not for displaying whitespace.