According to a recent comScore report, online shopping this year will be bright for smartphones and tablets.
comScore has, once again, released its predictions for the holiday shopping season, and for its predictions of 2013, it has pointed out that mobile commerce is going to have a very bright opportunity, particularly on Cyber Monday.
Although there is a shorter season this year, when compared to last year, the decline should be only “slight”.
Although many have wondered if the fact that there is nearly a week – 6 days – less this shopping season from this Thanksgiving to Christmas, when compared to last year, comScore believes that there will be only a “slight decline” in the overall growth rate that will be experienced in a typical year. Moreover, it has predicted that when compared to the powerful sales that are experienced over mobile commerce and online shopping, this decline will even be noticeable.
Once mobile commerce has weighed in, it is likely that the year over year growth will be 14 to 17 percent.
comScore’s predictions have shown that this will allow mobile commerce to reach its highest percentage ever achieved out of the total online shopping, this year. The figures that they are predicting are that smartphone and tablet based sales will represent 12 to 13 percent of online shopping, and that the spending will near $10 billion for the last quarter of this year.
Mobile commerce has already reached record high percentages of total online spending within the last three quarters of the fiscal year, this year. It is being anticipated that this trend will keep up for the remainder of 2013 and that it will leap beyond last year’s total digital commerce spending, which was 11.3 percent.
According to the report from comScore, “We have seen that in periods of concentrated consumer activity, a greater number of people are likely to engage in emerging behaviors, such as mobile commerce.” Taking into consideration the fact that this short shopping season has six fewer days than it did last year, the analytics firm has predicted that purchasing will be far more concentrated and will therefore expand the need for tools such as smartphone and tablet based shopping.
The comScore data indicated that while inside a retail store, many consumers are taking out their smartphones and are using mobile commerce behaviors to help them to make their decisions. For example, approximately 8.5 million people would phone or text a friend or family member in order to ask questions regarding a product that they are considering. Another 9.3 million people took pictures of items that they were thinking about and among them, 5.8 million sent them to family or friends.