Tag: mobile commerce statistics

A new report from the research firm has shown that by the close of 2016, sales will break the $142 billion mark.

Forrester Research has now released a new report that it has entitled its “U.S. Mobile Phone and Tablet Commerce Forecast, 2015 to 2020” and within it, it has shown that the close of this year will break $115 billion in transactions and they will only head upward from there.

The report also goes on to say that by the end of next year, m-commerce sales will explode past $142 billion.

Principal analyst at Forrester Research, Sucharita Mulpuru, who is also the firm’s vice president, explained that “We project that mobile phones will generate 15 percent of eCommerce sales by 2020, and tablets will generate 33 percent of eCommerce sales in the same time frame.” She also explained that as smartphones are rapidly becoming a main computing device for many consumers, it is surprising that those mobile commerce figures aren’t even higher than they already are.

The report from Forrester has placed the spotlight on many of the challenges creating a barrier to mobile commerce.

Although merchants have said that about a third of its current online traffic comes from mobile devices, the number of actual sales that are occurring over smartphones and tablets is only 11 percent. This shows that while people are visiting sites to check out brands, products, and stores, they aren’t actually using those same gadgets to make their purchases. When they do buy, it’s more likely to be in person or over a laptop.

Mulpuru stated that “Shoppers experience slow download speeds on smartphones in particular, and few retailers have managed to increase their mobile conversion rates over the years.” Most of the sales that are occurring over m-commerce are happening within three primary categories, which means that the majority of sectors remain underpenetrated and still have a great deal of unused potential. Those categories will need to go a long way before they will be able to experience success over that channel.

At the same time, there are also retailers who have been successful by way of mobile commerce innovations. In Forrester’s report, the firm explained that eBay and Amazon, combined, take in about one third of all shopping that is completed over smartphones and tablets in the United States.

This massive market is still seeing smartphone based shopping growth at an exponential rate.

The m-commerce market in China has seen a tremendous growth throughout the first quarter of this year, according to the figures that have been released in a report by a company called iResearch, which is based in Beijing.

The report indicated that in Q1 of this year, there was an increase in mobile shopping by 168 percent.

This brought the Chinese m-commerce market up to an estimated $59 billion. The growth rate in that market was tremendously greater than the overall mobile shopping increase seen globally, which was a very healthy 45 percent. The iResearch figures were based on measurements of the gross merchandise volumes (GMV). The prediction that was made based on the data is that there will have been a continued rapid growth throughout Q2 2015.

M-commerce purchases made up almost half of all online shopping that occurred in China during Q1.

The amount of online shopping that occurred over mobile devices more than doubled from what it had been during the same quarter last year, when it had been a much lower 22 percent. The data from last year’s fourth quarter showed that the GMV was peaking at $61.25 billion, after which, the figures dropped by 4.7 percent in the following quarter.

It was pointed out by iResearch that online shoppers in China have been increasingly embracing researching products and making purchases over their smartphones and tablets, and that growth of traffic over PCs has started slowing down.

The largest contributor to mobile GMV was Taobao Wireless (which is owned by Alibaba), but even that share fell from having been 87.4 percent in the first quarter of 2014 to be 84.5 percent in the same quarter, this year. The reason is that competitors are starting to gain some meaningful share. These include companies such as Vip and JD.com. Vip is now up to 2.8 percent while JD.com has increased to 5.2 percent (after it was at 3.3 percent, last year)

According to iResearch, this m-commerce competition has become increasingly intense, as each of the major participants battle to be able to grab hold of a greater share through new efforts and initiatives.