Tag: iphone mobile commerce

While the iPhone has always been the top smartphone for shoppers, its share is declining.

Traditionally – if one can use that word in the young world of mobile commerce – the largest number of sales have, by far, come from iPhones and iPads, whose owners have made far more and far larger purchases over their mobile devices than their Android gadget using counterparts.

However, this trend is shifting and over the last year, Android has gained a lot of ground in m-commerce sales.

In fact, recent data that was used in a report put out by BI Intelligence has shown that Android is rapidly closing the mobile commerce sales share gap in a number of different ways. The report examined a number of the trends that have occurred since the last holiday shopping season and has discovered that there have been notable changes in the average order value (AOV), the conversion rate, and the order share when it comes to mobile devices on these two most popular platforms.

These mobile commerce trends are important as they help to guide marketers and retailers in targeting their experiences.

The report indicated that Android is closing the m-commerce sales gap quite quickly. Among the ways in which serious changes were made over the last year are the following:

• Average order value – The average AOV over Android phone was $120, which was much closer to the average iPhone order at $129. The gap between tablets didn’t appear to shrink in any meaningful way.
• Conversion rate – Monetate stats showed that there was a 0.7 percent conversion rate with Android visitors, which was lower than the iPhone rate of 0.9 percent, but that was much closer than last year.
• Order share – About one in five sales on the Custora m-commerce platform was from Android based devices, a notable increase, particularly as the share from iPhones dropped at the same time.

The mobile commerce report also indicated that as Android becomes a more important commercial platform, it is not only taking a larger share of the space previously occupied by iOS based devices, but it was also seen to have been taking up more of online shopping as a whole.

The results of a recent study have indicated that Apple smartphone users shop over applications the most.

Arbitron has just released the results of its most recent marketing research study, and has revealed that when it comes to m-commerce apps, iPhone owners are using them much more often than Android smartphone owners.

The difference in the proportion of device owners who are using these apps is a considerable one.

The study showed that 67.5 percent of iPhone owners also use m-commerce apps, when compared to Android smartphone owners, among whom only 43. 9 percent use these applications. This could suggest that for companies with apps, iPhone customers may be their sweetest plum.

There was also a difference in the amount that the device users were spending over m-commerce apps.

Among iPhone users, the average number of m-commerce trips over apps every month was 35. Moreover, they spent an average of 105.5 minutes shopping using their smartphones every month. On the other hand, Android smartphone users went on an average of 29.5 virtual shopping trips every month, during which time they spent an average 87.6 minutes on the task.

The report on the results of the survey did not suggest any conclusions as to why this difference exists between the m-commerce app usage habits of iPhone owners and those of Android smartphone owners.

There has been third party speculation that while there are about the same total number of apps available in both formats, there may be more m-commerce apps that are available exclusively for Apple devices. Moreover, there has been a trend of releasing some apps over iOS first, with a wait time of several weeks or months before an Android option becomes available. Instagram has been used as a well known example of this trend, as there was an 18 month wait for Android users after iOS users were already enjoying the application.

That said, this data was not included in the Arbitron research, which examined only the m-commerce app usage habits. It did not go on to investigate what might be the causes behind those behaviors by each type of device user.