Mobile commerce stats round up

Graham Charlton
eConsultancy

Mobile purchasing habits in the US (Compete)

• 37% of US Smartphone users have made a (non-mobile) purchase on their handsets in the last six months.
  
• 19% have purchased music on their phones, 14% have bought books, DVDs or games, while 12% have purchased movie tickets.
  
• The amount that mobile users are willing to spend varies between handsets, with 32% of Android and 29% of iPhone users willing to spend $100 or more from their handsets, compared with 14% of Blackberry users.

Mobile purchasing habits in the US (ATG)

• 27% of all consumers used their mobiles to browse and research products at least four times over a 12 month period. For the 18-34 age group, this figure is 41%.
  
• 20% of all consumers and 32% 0F 18-34 year olds are researching purchases via mobile at least monthly.
  
• 13% of all consumers and 23% of the 18-34 age group make purchases via their mobile four times a year.

Mobile payments (Juniper)

• The market for mobile payments market is expected to quadruple by 2014, reaching $630bn in value, which equates to 5% of total e-commerce sales.
  
• The mobile payments market is worth $170bn so far this year.

Mobile commerce market size (ABI Research)

• The research firm predicts that in 2015, $119bn worth of goods and services will be purchased via a mobile phone.
  
• By ABI Research's count, mobile commerce tripled in the United States in 2009, but still only constituted a $1.2bn market.
  
• In Japan, which has one of the most vibrant mobile markets, mobile commerce exceeded $10bn in 2009.

Mobile internet usage (Essential Research)

• 47% of daily mobile internet users live in urban areas, while 42% of mobile internet users earn over £40,000 a year (household income) compared to 31% of non users.
  
• These daily mobile internet users are also more likely to spend more on their monthly mobile bills, 55% pay over £30 a month, compared to 10% of non users.

Smartphone usage (comScore)

• In the three month period ending in February 2010, 45.4m people in the U.S. owned smartphones, a 21% jump over November 2009.
  
• The fastest gainer in that segment is Google, whose Android platform rose by an impressive 5.2% in only three months.

New Study Shows the Mobile Web Will Rule by 2015

Morgan Stanley shared a comprehensive report charting the most important online trends and predicting the future of the Internet. In addition to forecasting more online shopping and showing the geographical distribution of Internet users, the study also shows a dramatic shift toward mobile web use.

mCommerce continues to grow, more quickly than e-commerce, now consisting of 4% of total retail sales. In addition, social networking has already eclipsed email usage.

Read more >

EBay generated $400M in business from iPhone app

Mobile Marketer
By Giselle Tsirulnik

EBay President/CEO John Donahoe said mobile is one of the key areas that the company is focusing on since devices will surely impact the way that consumers shop.

Mr. Donahoe said that the iPhone and BlackBerry devices are already changing consumers’ shopping habits and recommended that retailers change and evolve if they want to compete. He spoke at the Shop.org annual summit in Las Vegas.

“Mobile devices will play a role and the notion of mobility will have a huge impact on ecommerce,” Mr. Donahoe said.

In two years, about 40 percent of Internet access will happen from a mobile device. IPhones are only about 8 percent of the market, but they make up about 40 percent of Internet usage at present.

Since $400 million was generated in business since the eBay application’s launch, Mr. Donahoe said that devices like this one and others like it are going to impact his company.

Mr. Donahoe is president/CEO of eBay
Last week someone bought a $350,000 Lamborghini on the iPhone. Also, someone bought a $150,000 boat from their iPhone.

Consumers are bidding via mobile, browsing products and eBay’s mobile sales volume is growing in the double digits every month.

“I know this will be an important device for ecommerce,” Mr. Donahoe said.

Mrs. Freeman Evans is vice president and research director of Forrester
One of Mr. Donahoe’s colleagues came into his office and laid a book on his desk. To cover the title of the book, his colleague placed a pack of M&Ms on it. He snapped a picture with his iPhone and was able to locate various book stores that sell it and their prices for it.

Mr. Donahoe believes that innovation is driven by the small application developers and that they will impact how people will shop.

EBay is launching its first developer conference and will open its PayPal and eBay platforms for developers.

Mr. Donahoe talked about PayPal and said the payments side of ecommerce is what stifles the business.

“People are just not comfortable providing their credit card information over the Internet,” Mr. Donahoe said.

Mobile payments are the future.

EBay is right at the center of the technology and commerce worlds. 300-400 million people use eBay products worldwide.

The reason for eBay’s success?

“You have to adapt to compete and that is what we have done,” Mr. Donahoe said. “We adapted to the fact that consumers are embracing new technologies and we took advantage of that.”

Ecommerce is maturing as a market, but it is only about 5 percent of overall retail sales.

Mr. Donahoe forecasts it will eventually end up at 20-30 percent.

Traditionally in retail people talk about the online and offline, but the lines are blurring.

People are researching online, go in-store to buy and then once they are at a retail location, they use their mobile phones to comparison shop.

“There won’t be just one winner in ecommerce,” Mr. Donahoe said. “There will be many winners. When there is a lot of innovation, there are multiple winners.

“Online payments are a bit different, as it is a major friction point for online retail,” he said. “The online payments world will soon mirror the offline.

“It is all about convenience and speed and mobile payments and micro payments will help bring that 5 percent to 10 percent.”

After Mr. Donahoe’s keynote, Patti Freeman Evans, vice president and research director at Forrester Research interviewed the eBay executive.

She asked who he considers as his competition and he said instead of worrying about competition, eBay focuses on the customer.

Most likely this type of an approach is what got eBay 90 million unique visitors per month. A whopping 75 percent of that traffic is organic. The marketplace also buys about 20 million keywords from Google.

EBay is all about giving its merchants – big and small – access to traffic so that they can sell their merchandise.

“When we though about competition we did not want to focus on any competitor,” Mr. Donahoe said. “Instead we ruthlessly focus on customers. We need to think about how to win and get our sellers to win."

Senior Editor Giselle Tsirulnik covers ad networks, advertising, content, email, media, messaging, legal/privacy, search, social networks, television and video. Reach her at giselle@mobilemarketer.com.

Getting to Know the Mobile Population

eMarketer

Sophisticated—and diverse

Mobile users are inseparable from their devices. Whether they have a smartphone or a traditional feature phone, it goes with them at all times. And as these devices become more capable, they are evolving into extensions of users’ desktops and home communications and entertainment systems.

Penetration will near 100% by 2013, reflected in a modest 2.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the number of subscribers between 2008 and 2013.

Mobile Internet usage has been steadily rising, with some of the traditional barriers—namely cost, complexity and user experience—beginning to fall away. eMarketer predicts that growth will persist over the next five years, albeit at a slower pace. In the US, the number of mobile users accessing the Internet will jump from 73.7 million in 2009 to 134.3 million in 2013, a CAGR of 17.7%.

The mobile Internet user population in the US is now roughly one-third the size of the wired Internet audience, a gap that will narrow by the early part of the next decade. Smartphones constitute the bridge between the desktop and mobile Web.

Further, despite the spotlight on smartphones, they remain a minority share of the mobile device market. Smartphone users are a far more attractive group, both for the audience demographics and usage patterns, but marketers that ignore the other 80% to 85% of the user population do so to their detriment.

Read more >

Usage of Mobile Devices Still Growing Briskly

Mediaweek

According to a July Forrester Research study, usage of mobile devices continues to grow. 15% of participants answered that that they now use their cell phones to access the Internet, a 4% increase from the previous year. A demographic focus showed that 18-29 year olds depend on their smartphones for features far beyond "entry level" activities (text messages, e-mail, IM). Compared to an older market, the younger group is much more likely to surf the mobile Internet, accessing social networks or playing music.

Read more >

Americans Flocking To Internet With Wireless Devices

Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project finds a 73% increase in Americans accessing the Web via their handheld devices since late 2007.

W. David Gardner
InformationWeek

The Pew report author attributes the escalation to Americans' desire to connect with others, satisfy information inquiries, and share content with friends -- wherever, whenever. A demographic study reveals that African Americans are 70% more likely than Caucasians to access the mobile Web on an average day.

Read more >

Mobile Trends: iPhone Accounts for 43% of Mobile Internet Usage

AdMob's recent Mobile Metrics Report finds that Apple's iPhone now accounts for 43% of mobile Internet usage and traffic. Compared to sales, iPhone surpassed other models in the amount of mobile Web usage and HTML usage. Mobile-optimized sites and iPhone Apps have likely contributed to this rapid growth.

Learn more >

The Proof Lies In Mobile Growth

MediaPost: Online Media Daily

The mobile device is quickly becoming the world's newest gateway to information. This provides users with relevant information on the go and creates an increased opportunity for advertisers to reach their intended audiences.

The last decade has seen incredible growth in the mobile space. Today there are more mobile devices than personal computers and televisions combined: At last count there were 4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide ITU, compared to 1 billion personal computer users. Additionally, with the advent of new, more engaging devices like the iPhone and Android-based devices, shipments of smartphones now equal those of laptops. The large growth in the number of phones, particularly of high-end devices, combined with the availability of affordable flat-rate data plans from phone carriers, is helping to fuel the growth and access to the mobile web.

In the US, more than 50% of consumers use their mobile handsets for more than just voice calls. According to eMarketer, 2009 will be the first time that more than half of all new connections to the Internet will come from a phone. Not surprisingly, brands want to ensure that they have a presence on the mobile Internet to be in front of these mobile users.

Read more >

Mobile Web Addiction Rising, Researchers Say

by John Paczkowski
All Things Digital

Just as the mobile Web and the wired Web are converging, so too are their audiences, which are destined to reach parity in size–and sooner, rather than later. According to the latest metrics from comScore, day-to-day mobile Internet usage in the states doubled over the last year. In January 2008, 10.8 million people visited the mobile Web at least once a day. Now there are some 22.4 million. Most do so looking for news or other basic information, though many are looking for interaction as well. Social networking, for example, saw a massive spike in usage, its audience growing 427 percent year over year.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” said comScore’s Mark Donovan. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information. Social networking and blogging have emerged as very popular daily uses of the mobile Web and these activities are growing at a torrid pace,” observed Donovan. “We also note that much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone, and by text-based searches.”

Obviously, the mobile browsing experience hasn’t yet matched its wired counterpart in quality. But clearly it’s getting there. And right now, it’s at the “decent enough” stage to woo the audience that will drive its further and more rapid improvement.