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Mobile commerce is driving massive visitor numbers to websites

Julie Campbell | September 4, 2013

Amazon, the leading retail sight among American consumers, has seen tremendous traffic increases.

According to a recent comScore analysis, the leading online retail store in the United States, Amazon, has increased its site’s visitor access by 42.9 million visitors exclusively over smartphones and tablets, over the month of June, alone.

This suggests that over one quarter of the shoppers at Amazon are shopping over these portable devices.

Among all of the 143.9 million people who made up the total digital audience at Amazon, a whopping 29 percent were mobile commerce only. When the visitors who visited the site from both desktops and either smartphones or tablets were taken into account, the total mobile audience was greater than that of the audience that used desktops exclusively.

It is important to note that Amazon isn’t even a leader in terms of the size of its mobile commerce audience.

Mobile Commerce and website traffic The massive online retailer is not one of the largest mobile commerce only audiences in terms of their percentages (that is, as a percentage of their total audience). For example, Target had a mobile only audience of 37 percent, and Ticketmaster boasted 39 percent. Those were the second and first place companies, respectively. In third place was Best Buy, which had a mobile commerce only audience of 35 percent.

At the same time, other online retailers did not enjoy exactly this degree of boost from mobile commerce, however for all of the sites that were considered in the study, smartphones and tablets remained an important driver for what look to be incremental visits. This helps to better illustrate precisely how important the smartphone and tablet optimized shopping experience has already become.

It has been speculated that Amazon may have opened its Amazon Associates program to app developers in order to help to better capitalize on its mobile commerce strength. This will give developers the opportunity to advertise on their apps and link to actual Amazon products, earning themselves a cut of any sales that are made as a result. This could help to place the online retailer in direct and powerful competition with Google and Facebook.

Gadgets dependencies are leading to nomophobia

Julie Campbell | September 2, 2013

A study in the United Kingdom has revealed that many people fear having to live without mobile devices.

The results of a brand new study regarding the dependence that people in the United Kingdom have on their mobile gadgets has just revealed that over half of the population of that country suffers from a condition called “nomophobia”, in which the individual feels actual fear when thinking about having to live without his or her device.

This new anxiety condition goes well beyond simply thinking about a world without smartphones.

In fact, there are a number of different elements of being out of touch with the gadgets that can lead to symptoms of nomophobia. These can include having the battery run out, losing a cellular signal, or simply losing sight of the device. The term itself was developed as a short form for “no mobile phone phobia”. This term was originally coined in the United Kingdom following a YouGov study in which the anxieties related to mobile device use were examined.

This latest study only underscores what has previously been determined about dependencies on electronic gadgets.

Mobile Gadgets - Nomophobia The latest survey was commissioned by AppRiver, which is a security analyst firm. This research found that among the respondents, 42 percent brought their mobile gadgets with them to the beach when they were on vacation, and that one fifth of them used their devices for checking their email when they were in bed.

One in every four of the participants in the mobile gadgets study also used their devices for checking emails and texts while they were out on a dinner date. It also revealed that it was women who were more likely to do this than men, by a difference of ten percent. Women were also 17 percent more likely to actually experience nomophobia.

Beyond those figures, the study also underscored the fact that while people seemed highly reliant on their gadgets, and they experienced fear when faced with situations when they would not be able to use their devices, they still had a notably low interest in the actual security of their device in terms of protecting their sensitive and private data.