eBay Europe CEO, Alexander von Schirmeister, has just left the stage at IAB Mobile Engage after revealing a bunch of stats around the importance of mobile to eBay’s businesses.
He said that between them, eBay, PayPal and Gsi Commerce “touched” $175bn last year, a figure that will rise to $300bn in 2015.

He told delegates: “Talking about mCommerce and eCommerce is no longer relevant, certainly not in retail. The smartphone has fundamentally changed the retail ecosystem. (It) has brought offline and online retailers together. If anyone thought physical retail commerce was dying, on the contrary, mobile is bringing it back big time.”

He went on to say that this brings its own challenges, that the market obliges you as a retailer to have an omnichannel presence. This begs the question, of course, of whether eBay will ever make a serious assault on the High Street, beyond its 2-week pop-up stores. (I filed the question on Twitter as we were invited to do at the start of the day, but no response as yet.)

Interestingly, as I write this, Sienne Veit, head of mobile at Kiddicare, is on a mobile commerce panel, and is explaining how Kiddicare took the unusual step for a pureplay online retailer of opening physical stores, and explaining how the brand leverages its digital assets in those stores, and to drive shoppers in to them. Kiddicare made its move into bricks and mortar retail after buying 10 former Best Buy stores in January 2012.

Back to the stats, von Schirmeister revealed that eBay transacted $13bn on mobile in 2012, and that globally, one third of eBay’s global transactions involved mobile at some point in the process. eBay’s apps have been downloaded 160m times, and it offers 350m items at any one time, of which 70 per cent are new, and 72 per cent are sold on a fixed price basis. Clearly then, anyone who still thinks of eBay as an auction site needs to get up to speed.

He finished up by explaining how eBay had adopted a policy of embracing and protecting disruptive innovation. When developing its mobile properties, the teams working on them were instructed not to worry about the impact their work would have on the rest of the business, or the friction it would cause.

“That friction is still there in the company today. They were encouraged not to worry about upsetting other people. If we had stopped to integrate first, we would not be where we are today,”he told delegates. “You can’t afford to get bogged down by internal politics and huge working groups where the consensus would probably have shut down half the apps involved.”