Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Smartphones accounted for 45.1 percent of all shopping traffic online in the first quarter of 2016. According to a study from Demandware, phones barely took the lead over computers, which accounted for 45 percent of all traffic. The e-commerce software provider predicts that phones will account for 60 percent of all e-commerce traffic by the end of 2017.

As e-commerce continues to grow – it accounted for 7.8 percent of retail sales in the first quarter, up from 1.3 percent in 2002 – the importance of mobile also grows.

"If they can get it right on mobile today and tomorrow, that's where they're going to see a lot of value going forward," Rick Kenney, author of the study and head of consumer insights for Demandware, told Star-Telegram. Sales from mobile more than doubled from 2013 to 2015, according to ComScore....

Is mobile a big deal? You bet it is. And to prove our point, we’ve collected 40 of the most important facts about mobile that every business person should know.Ready to check ’em out? Here goes:

Today’s mobile phone is more powerful than the PCs that sent two astronauts to the moon in 1969. Source:  http://quarterly.insigniam.com/innovation/by-the-numbers

The first commercial cellular network was launched by NTT in Japan in 1979. Source: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2009/11/celebrating-30-years-of-mobile-phones-thank-you-ntt-of-japan.html

The first multi national cellular network was the Nordic Mobile Telephony in 1981. It even supported roaming. Source:  http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/review/2006_03/files/3_fifty_years.pdf ...

The rise of smartphones, tablets, and phablets has led to so many shifts—from little tweaks (such as the need for bigger, clearer fonts) to huge strategic moves (the current payment wars)—that just keeping track of it all can feel overwhelming. Trying to draw the right strategic lessons is even more daunting.

To help, we’ve highlighted seven key ways mobile devices have transformed e-commerce. This list, of course, is no means an exhaustive rundown of every change in the space. Rather, it’s simply an overview of some of the shifts we believe matter most....

Consumers continue to use digital coupons to stretch their dollars. eMarketer forecasts that digital coupon users, which include internet users ages 18 and older who redeem a digital coupon or code via any device for online or offline shopping at least once per year, will account for 55.0% all US internet users in 2014.

The digital coupon audience is a relatively mature group, but there's still room for modest growth over the next few years.

Mobile coupon users are making up a growing portion of the larger digital coupon audience as more consumers make in-home purchases via smartphone and tablet and as more shoppers use a mobile device to enhance their in-store experiences.

eMarketer expects the number of adults who redeem coupons via mobile device for either online or offline shopping to rise from 78.69 million to 104.11 million between 2014 and 2016, or from 70.0% to 82.0% of all digital couponers....

In 2015, mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic at 90 percent of major media outlets, including 88 percent of the largest U.S. newspapers, according to Pew’s 2016 State of the News Media report. Just a year earlier, only 65 percent of respondents had reported mobile traffic that exceeded desktop views.

The biggest year-over-year change came in the newspaper sector. In 2014, only 28 of 50 newspapers included in the survey brought in more traffic via mobile than desktop. In 2015, that number jumped to 44 of 50.

41.6 million – That’s how many U.S. consumers are expected be mobile-only internet users by 2020, according to a recent eMarketer report. Currently, about 31.1 million U.S. internet users (or 11.7 percent) access the internet strictly via mobile devices, while another 215 million people use both mobile devices and desktops/laptops to surf the web.

The number of people who access the internet exclusively via desktops/laptops is expected to drop from 18.8 million this year to 10.0 million in 2020. Meanwhile, the total number of Americans connected to the internet is projected to keep rising over the next five years, reaching an estimated 279.3 million by the end of the decade....

The latest example of this deals with mobile coupons. It turns out that consumers who lean on mobile coupons for food shopping – and that’s a lot of people – often change brands for the sake of variety, according to a new study.

The majority of consumers don’t use mobile coupons, but a third (33%) do. And that’s where the behavioral change potential resides.

Nearly half (44%) of mobile coupon users like to change brands often for the sake of variety and novelty, according to the study conducted by GfK. The survey comprised a look at 6,500 products in about 600 categories....

For the first time, over a third (34%) of browser-based online transactions globally are now made on a mobile device, compared to just over 30% in Q3, 2015, a recent research study reveals.

The increase is driven particularly by major Asian-based payment methods including JCB, UnionPay, and Alipay, according to the 'Mobile Payments Index' issued by the payments technology provider Adyen. JCB recorded the highest share of mobile payments across all the payment methods analyzed, with 54% of payments on the Adyen platform made on a mobile device, up from 47% in Q3, 2015....

While at Google’s offices recently, I had the pleasure to hear a Google Product Manager present the company’s view of how information retrieval has changed with the rise of mobile and smartphone adoption.

They are calling it “micro-moments,” the premise being that as smartphone adoption and use continues to skyrocket, consumers increasingly have small bursts of interaction with their phones across search, social, video and email, as opposed to prolonged periods in front of a desktop.

This viewpoint represents a shift from the linear “sit, search and act” desktop mentality that characterized the early days of the internet, in which research and action were typically performed in one sitting while in front of a connected internet device.

These days, according to Google, more searches are done on mobile than on desktop in many countries, including the United States, Japan and United Kingdom.

Google’s micro-moment perspective posits that discovery and action are decoupled as discovery comes in multi-session bursts, across channels, on a mobile device, while action (conversion/purchase) often takes place later on a larger screen, a laptop or tablet device....