I was on the receiving end of so many stats at a Mobile Commerce Seminar staged by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) this morning that I barely know where to start. Maybe the best thing is just to share them with you for starters.
The first was from comScore, based on December 2010 data. It analysed the top 5 retail sites that were not optimised for mobile and the top 5 that were, and found that people spend 3.5 x longer and look at 3.5x as many pages on the optimised sites, compared to the non-optimised.
The IAB’s mobile manager, Alex Kozloff, then presented a bunch of stats relating to mCommerce in Christmas 2010. Of the 30.2m people in the UK who visited “commerce sites” in December, 6.3m did so via their phone, according to comScore/GSMA data. This is 17 per cent of the total eCommerce audience, but as this figure does not include wi-fi connections, only cellular, the actual figure is likely to be closer to 10m, or one third of the total. There were 6.3m visits to retailer sites from mobile, including 1.6m each to eBay and Amazon, and 850,000 to Tesco.
Kozloff also revealed that mobile site builder Usablenet’s UK clients, including ASOS and JD Sports, saw an average 300 per cent increase in traffic to their mobile sites over the Christmas period, while mobile ad network Adfonic saw a 400 per cent increase in clicks on ads in its network over the Christmas weekend.
Outside of the UK, Kozloff quoted stats from ABI Research revealing that in Japan, mCommerce was worth more than $10bn in 2010. Plus more from comScore showing that 9.8m Japanese consumers used a mobile wallet to buy goods and services in December 2010. Finally, she quoted analysis from Juniper Research which forecast that by 2014, almost half the mobile world will be paying for goods and services via their mobile. 
There were more stats later from Nic Cumisky, senior industry manager at Google. He either didn’t quote a source for some of these, or if he did I missed it, but either way, I’m confident he wasn’t making them up. He revealed that the bookmaker Paddy Power now takes 10 per cent of all its bets via mobile; House of Fraser has seen 600 per cent growth in mobile sales since June 2010; and 23 per cent of all time spent accessing the web is now through mobile. You want more? He wasn’t finished yet. 40 per cent of all Tweets are mobile. Sony’s Twitter account for its VAIO PC range has generated over £1m in sales. Moving onto check-in services and mobile coupons, he pointed out that Shopkick has attracted 100m users since June 2010, and that a Japanese restaurant sold 72,000 burgers in 72 hours, off the back of a Groupon promotion. With the wind in his stat sails, Cumisky also revealed that eBay in the UK does one sale every second on mobile, and that it sells a Ferrari every month on mobile.
Ordinarily, I would conclude a piece like this with a pay-off line about how such stats reveal the seemingly unstoppable momentum that mobile commerce is gathering, with a rallying call to anyone who hasn’t yet got it, to get it sooner rather than later. To be honest though, if the stats themselves don’t do the trick, I don’t think anything I or anyone else might say will make any difference.
David Murphy
Editor
