Mobile Commerce is Here to Stay

Published June 09, 2011 Share

Another one of the more popular presentations at last month’s OnTarget 2011 was Shopatron Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Sean Collier’s discussion on “The Present and Future of Mobile.”

As Collier pointed out during his discussion, mobile commerce is no longer the next big thing, it’s here now, and it’s here to stay.

In fact, as pointed out in previous presentations we’ve written about this year, mobile’s adoption growth has been exponential, further enhanced by the iPhone and iPod Touch – among the fastest adopted consumer electronics of all-time. 

Today, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone in business that isn’t using a mobile device to browse the web on the go. People browse the mobile web in line at the supermarket, from their couch, even from the restroom.

Smartphones, as Google notes on its Mobile Ads Blog, have become an indispensable shopping tool.

Not only do 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to compare prices, research products and locate retailers, 74% of them purchase – whether it’s online, in-store or from their phones, according a Google’s study conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm, among 5,013 US adult smartphone Internet users at the end of 2010.

Shopatron has seen the early mobile adoption, and conversion, first hand. We made a big splash on the mobile scene last summer, launching mobile-optimized sites for 600 brands.

In less than a year, mobile users now account for close to 10% of our client stores’ total traffic, with some sites seeing as much as 18% of traffic coming from mobile devices.

The most popular mobile devices include iPhone (37%), iPad (29%) and Android (22%).

So this much is clear: If you don’t have a strategy for your brand’s mobile experience and eCommerce strategy, now’s the time to jump onboard before the mobile opportunity passes you by.