Mobile commerce interactions with brands hold considerable influence

The majority of online shoppers will interact in some way with brands over tablets and smartphones.

According to the Mobile Commerce Index report published by Branding Brand, online shopping has now crested a vital peak in terms of consumer behaviors over devices such as smartphones and tablets.

The majority of shoppers are headed to m-commerce websites instead of exclusively using the standard web.

The report showed that last month, smartphones and tablets were responsible for more than half – 51 percent – of all online visits to retail websites. Most of these mobile commerce visits came from Apple devices. Comparatively, when looking at the same figures from 2010, only four percent of all online retail visits had been from users of these smaller screen devices. Clearly this represents a meaningful jump in the number of mobile visits and represents a considerable shift in consumer behaviors.

In four years, mobile commerce has started to play a tremendously larger role in online shopping.

According to co-founder of Branding Brand, CEO Chris Mason, “In four short years, our data has tracked the rapid rise of the mobile consumer from a small fraction of users in 2010, to this moment where the majority of online retail visitors now originate via smartphones and tablets.” He also pointed that this “fundamental shift” in the behavior of shoppers from laptop computers to mobile devices has occurred with tremendous speed, the likes of which have never before been seen. It also offers retail the “greatest opportunity” that it has seen since the internet first became commonplace.

Mason stated that it is not only that the majority of visits online are stemming from tablets and smartphones, but that it is specifically mobile devices from Apple that are being used for these purposes. He said that in August, among all smartphone based visits, 61 percent were from iPhones and among all tablet based visits, 81 percent were from iPads.

When looking at previous adoption trends of some of the most recent operating systems released by the device maker, Branding Brand feels that iOS 8 is going to have a meaningful and substantial impact on holiday mobile commerce traffic, and will represent the majority of retail site visits.