Game-Changing Mobile Ecommerce Statistics

The statistics are in: consumers want a seamless desktop-to-mobile shopping experience. Furthermore, consumers are increasingly relying upon mobile devices to research and buy the products that they want. If your online store is not catering to this growing demographic of tech-savvy shoppers, you are assuredly missing out on sales. We’ll breakdown the most pertinent of these mobile ecommerce shopping statistics so you can see how the trends stack up.

If you run a local business, you’ll actually be getting more traction from mobile searches than desktop searches. Now this number is important, even for e-retailers, because it reflects just how much consumers rely upon their mobile devices to find the products and services they use the most.

As the chart below reflects, courtesy of Search Engine Land, 78% of searches from mobile devices lead to an in-store conversion. In contrast, only 61% of desktop searches lead to an in-store conversion and about 64% of tablet searches lead to an in-store conversion.

You’ve probably seen app creation services advertising online, and it’s likely that you’ve even been contacted by a mobile app developer. What they want you to know is that you need a mobile app for X amount of dollars. But what they won’t tell you is that most shoppers prefer to use a mobile site as opposed to a mobile app when shopping.

In fact, as the infographic below demonstrates, 70% of mobile users prefer to shop on a mobile website as opposed to a mobile app, across all devices. This breaks down to a staggering 67% of mobile users who prefer a mobile website as opposed to 33% who prefer a mobile application. The infographic included below offers some more details.

A Mobile Commerce Daily report found that 80% of consumers had a better perception of retailers that offered mobile coupons. What’s more, and the most important statistic here, is that 70% of all mobile shoppers have redeemed a coupon at either a brick and mortar or an online store in the past year, according to Key Ring.

Understanding this nomenclature is easy: people like getting deals and having them on their smartphones. So if you are running an ecommerce store that has a mobile website version, make sure you adhere to these mobile ecommerce statistics by offering mobile coupons… because they are likely to be redeemed, thus generating you more conversions in your funnel.

The most popular shopping days of the year in the U.S. includes the weekend that spans Black Friday and Cyber Monday. During this time, according to a study that was conducted by Custora, nearly 40% of all purchases were made from a mobile device. This has led to the re-coining of the day (by Custora) to “Mobile Friday.” Whether that lucrative adage holds up is irrelevant. What it does reflect is that shoppers want to be able to buy things from their mobile device during the busiest shopping days of the year.

Now bear in mind that this report reflected sales tallies from years 2012 and 2013 respectively. These numbers are expected to be even greater from 2014, with experts saying that mobile shopping amounted to about 44% of all sales during this same time period in 2014.

Consumers love to use their smartphones to shop online. This is a trend that has been gaining force since 2010, when mobile devices were finally catching up to their tablet and computer cousins, in terms of speed and capability. Since that time, the numbers have skyrocketed on mobile shopping.

According to a report by comScore:

• 44% of retail Internet minutes are spent on mobile phones.
• 11% of retail Internet minutes are spent on tablets.

Add these two percentages up, and you will arrive at this conclusion: shoppers spend more time on mobile devices than they do on desktop computers or laptops. If over half of all shoppers are predominantly using a mobile device to find the products they want to buy online, it’s pretty straightforward to know that you need to cater to this by featuring a seamless shopping experience across all devices.

Mobile is on the rise. These mobile ecommerce statistics suggest that mobile already dominates online shopping as the preferred device. Wise e-retailers will assure that their websites are properly optimized for mobile shoppers, and that the experience is as seamless as possible, lest they be left behind in the cyber dust trails of the smartphone and tablet users of the present day.