“Mobile is ramping up faster than any other technology we have seen in the past,” says Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. Mobile web adoption is happening eight times faster than traditional web adoption in the late ’90s.

With that growth comes a new set of user behaviors and consumer trends. What’s the reality when it comes to the new mobile commerce landscape? Here are five facts that will have striking implications for the future of mobile commerce.

1. Customers Spend More Time on Their Mobile Devices Than Desktops.

My company powers about 20,000 ecommerce sites. The average desktop order in 2011 was $95.19, and the average mobile order amounted to $96.92. The difference of $1.73 per order may appear small, but that 2% increase in average cart size can dramatically affect a company’s bottom line.

While multiple factors contribute to this data, the most important may be the power of the tablet, which has quickly emerged as the third digital screen in consumers’ lives, in addition to desktops and smartphones.

Continue reading the article on Mashable.

The flurry of the 2011 holiday shopping season has passed and we’re starting to see some data and larger trends emerge.

The 2011 holiday season saw more retail sales, but fewer in-store shoppers, with sales growing 3.5% but foot traffic declining 3.1%.

Where did the additional sales come from?

Mobile and e-commerce. From 2011 to 2012, growth in online spending during the holiday season jumped up 15%, from $32.4 billion to $37.2 billion.

More Technology, More Choice

Consumers are becoming more comfortable with different technologies, with 76% of consumers researched online prior to buying over holiday season. More tellingly, retailers saw a more mobile shopping season.  On average, retailers’ sites saw:

• 12% of total visits from mobile
• 9% of total sales conducted on mobile
• 173% increase in mobile shopping on Christmas Day.

The largest gains were posted by smartphones users, 80% of whom used them more frequently for shopping.  Complementing smartphones were tablet users, 70% of whom used them more frequently this year, while 38% spent more money on them this season.

With such a shift to smartphones and tablets, retailers increasingly need to provide shoppers with great experiences across devices. In fact, 25% of shoppers shopped on more than one device type (e.g. phone and tablet), including 42% who used more than one device at the same time.

The data reveals that 69% of shoppers started on 1 device and then continued on another, demonstrating both the complexity of shopping experiences as well as showing the critical need for e-commerce retailers to keep shopping cart contents persistent across all platforms.

Lessons Learned

In summary, the 3 main lessons from the Google & Ipsos post holiday shopping study were:

1. Online sales drove growth
2. Holiday shoppers expected your store at their fingertips
3. Consumers were “always on”

With our customers we’ve been busy talking about mobile commerce on tablets. We believe that 2012 will be a huge year for tablet commerce for many reasons.

Across data source we can see on tablets that average order values are significantly higher(50% according to an Adobe study), but shoppers spend more time and engaged deeper with content.

The key takeaway?

To keep up with shoppers, mobile e-commerce retailers need to invest consistently across all devices – mobile, tablet, and desktop – to ensure the best possible experience, no matter how shoppers visit.

A consistent and excellent experience keeps your brand top of mind, engaging and available in all the ways people are shopping.

–

Sources:

Smartphones and tablets influence consumer purchasing decisions on mobile, online and in store – Google Mobile Ads Blog

Post Holiday Learning for 2012 – Think Insights with Google

Background and Context

A few months ago we looked at a snapshot of Facebook’s sharing data on mobile and found that 57% of all sharing was through the mobile web, with all apps on all platforms combined – iPhone, Android and Blackberry – contributing 40%.

(Click for full size image.)

Combine that data snapshot with ongoing rumors of a full HTML-5 version of Facebook, fit for the mobile web and codenamed Project Spartan, and we can start to see the macro trend of Facebook’s business and users is to embrace the mobile web as essential.

Mobile Summary of S-1 Filing

In Facebook’s S-1 Filing, we saw more details on mobile usage, growth and revenues that caught our eyes.

(The S-1 is a form companies use to describe their business when they go public. Here’s more background on S-1 filings.)

And a few of the mobile details that stood out in the coverage:

• Facebook reports 845 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs)
• 57% of monthly active users visit Facebook every day and are classified as Daily Active Users (DAUs)
• 425 million of those monthly active users (~50%) used Facebook mobile products in December, 2011
• Facebook does not serve advertising on its mobile experience so increased mobile usage actually hurts their revenues
• Facebook are nervous about mobile because “user growth and engagement on mobile devices depend upon effective operation with mobile operating systems, networks, and standards that we do not control”

As covered by ReadWriteWeb in Facebook’s Biggest Risks Explained, quoting Antone Johnson in point form:

“No revenue currently generated from mobile advertising; unclear how much mobile use could be monetized; failure to solve this puzzle combined with a dramatic shift toward mobile usage could be a serious problem for FB; and per the next risk factor, they don’t control the iOS and Android platforms.”

So mobile presents a paradox for Facebook: huge growth, no current revenues.

Mobile is how their users are increasingly choosing to access Facebook but they haven’t figured out how to insert their key revenue driver – advertising – into the experience.

Mobile: Engine of International Growth

Reading the Facebook S-1 and knowing a lot about international mobile traffic, we can see that a heavyweight driver of Facebook growth around the world is the mobile web.

From the Facebook S-1:

There are more than two billion global Internet users, according to an industry source, and we aim to connect all of them. We have achieved varying levels of penetration within the population of Internet users in different countries. For example, in countries such as Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela we estimate that we have penetration rates of greater than 80% of Internet users; in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States we estimate that we have penetration rates of approximately 60%; Increased mobile usage was a key contributor to this growth. DAUs as a percentage of MAUs increased from 54% in December 2010 to 57% in December 2011.

And as move towards 2014, the year when mobile becomes the #1 way to access the web, mobile will increase its importance as the engine for international growth of online businesses.

Reading into the numbers, it’s apparent that Facebook see the popularity of the mobile web today and also a dominant future for the mobile web around the globe.

So it will be interesting to watch their evolution as a public company, as they are required to share more information publicly.

If early indications are accurate, mobile apps will be part to their mobile strategy and the mobile web will be essential.

In 2012, Mobify served 167 million people mobile pages – equal to around 20% of all smartphone subscribers.

Of those people, most of them used their mobile phones to access the web.

However, there has been a huge surge in tablet traffic, specifically from the iPad.

Data shows that smartphone users are more like than desktop to purchase online.

On top of this, tablet users are more likely than smartphone users to purchase – and when they do, they, on average, spend more.

Despite this, many retailers do not have a tablet optimized site.

Read more at Gigaom.

That’s more than the entire population of Japan and Canada combined.

That’s also equal to around 2.4% of the world’s total population.

This works out to around 20% of all smartphone subscribers in the world, based on Morgan Stanley’s estimate of 835 million smartphone subscribers worldwide.

The Mobify Platform in 2012

Looking ahead to 2012, we continue to see huge growth in mobile traffic overall and in more incredible grwoth in mobile traffic on the Mobify Platform.

In 2012, we are on track to exceed:

• 5 million unique visitors a day on mobile
• 1.3 billion visits
• 30 pages served / second

These are predictions for the Mobify Platform and they’re echoed by other industry giants.

In a speech at Marketforce’s Broadcasting and Digital Entertainment conference in London, YouTube’s director of content partnerships Ben Wilson revealed that they project mobile usage will surpass desktop usage in 2013, if not sooner.  He made the prediction based on YouTube’s current data – serving three billion views a day – 15% of which already comes from mobile devices.

The big picture change we’re witnessing is the acceleration of mobile usage beyond projections from years ago.

Mobile is growing faster than projected and much, much faster than almost everyone is preparing to serve.

Are you ready?

Maybe it’s time you talked to Mobify.