A mobile commerce platform (Branding Brand) showed substantial increases in shopping from smartphones. The data was collected over a 35-day period from November 21 through to December 25, 2012.

The Branding Brand Mobile Commerce Index is a compilation of 84 mobile sites developed by Branding Brand for retailers across a variety of industries including apparel, health and beauty, and home goods. The Index is the largest collection of data on commerce sites specifically designed for smartphones, as opposed to non-optimized desktop sites with mobile traffic.¹

“While the year-over-year growth and traffic demonstrated the explosion in mobile as a channel, we are also seeing dramatic conversion rate improvements as a result of optimization work throughout our technology platform,” said Chris Mason, co-founder and CEO of Branding Brand.

Mcommerce – mobile shopping

The company has produced an interesting infographic that displays the key finding.

However, Mashable writes that for most retailers, mcommerce has had limited impact.

Lauren Indvik of Mashable said, “Sales of physical retail goods and services made on smartphones were $8 billion in the U.S. last year, accounting for 3% of online sales and less than 1% of total retail sales.”²

But given that smartphone take-up has only really accelerated in the last two to three years, it makes sense that it will be lagging the normal online sector. What is important is the pace of acceleration. 171% is a significant increase which is only going to continue.

Forrester, where Indvik got her data from, agree with this sentiment. Indvik also said, “Ensure that your mobile commerce site has a fast checkout solution, like PayPal Express or Checkout by Amazon. Make sure your mobile website is responsively designed so that it is optimized for the wide variety of device screen sizes on the market.”

Acknowledgements

• ¹ Branding Brand, (2013), “Branding Brand Mobile Commerce Index Shows Holiday Sales up 171%, Conversion up 30%“
• ² Lauren Indvik, (2013, January), “Forrester: Mobile Commerce to Quadruple to $31 Billion in Next 5 Years“, Mashable
• Sarah Perez, (2013, January), “M-Commerce Boom Over Holidays: One-Third Of E-Commerce Traffic Was Mobile; Sales Up 171%, Conversions Up 30%“, TechCrunch