Mobile Ecommerce Forecast To Hit $84B In 2014

Ecom­merce is grow­ing fast and mobile devices are fuelling that growth. How can brands bet­ter under­stand their con­sumers and the way they are seek­ing out prod­ucts and eval­u­at­ing retail­ers? The 500 lead­ing retail­ers in mobile com­merce will see sales of $83.78...

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Ecom­merce is grow­ing fast and mobile devices are fuelling that growth. How can brands bet­ter under­stand their con­sumers and the way they are seek­ing out prod­ucts and eval­u­at­ing retail­ers?


The 500 lead­ing retail­ers in mobile com­merce will see sales of $83.78 bil­lion by the end of 2014, accord­ing to a new fore­cast from Inter­net Retail­er.

Mobile sales will account for 21.2 per­cent of an esti­mat­ed $394.71 bil­lion in total web sales by retail­ers that make up Inter­net Retail­er’s Mobile 500 list.

The fig­ure also rep­re­sents a 79.9 per­cent rise from the $46.56 bil­lion in sales that the lead­ing 500 mobile com­merce brands achieved in 2013.

Highlights & Trends

Trends revealed in the report cen­ter around increased use of hand­held devices, respon­sive design, and a rise in the num­ber and preva­lence of apps offered by m‑commerce retail­ers.

1. Tablet Sales Outnumber Smartphone Sales, But Not For Long

Of the $83.78 bil­lion in 2014 mobile sales, 59 per­cent will be from tablet devices, and 41 per­cent from smart­phones. How­ev­er, as high­light­ed in the report:

…many m‑commerce experts pre­dict that the rise of larg­er smart­phones com­bined with ongo­ing mobile tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ments that make buy­ing eas­i­er on smart­phones — such as Apple open­ing up its bio­met­ric fin­ger­print scan­ner to devel­op­ers to enable one-touch log-in and one-touch check­out — will tilt the mobile sales scales in favor of smart­phones in the years to come.”

2. Big Rise In Responsive Design

The num­ber of retail­ers in the Mobile 500 with respon­sive design web­sites increased 164 per­cent in com­par­i­son to 2014. The respon­sive design approach, which aims to opti­mize view­ing and inter­ac­tions across devices, nat­u­ral­ly increas­es user con­fi­dence in mak­ing their trans­ac­tions via the device they have been using for research rather than switch­ing to a desk­top.

More than one-fifth of the all m‑commerce retail­ers now have respon­sive design web­sites, and devel­op­ers and oth­er mobile experts pre­dict that num­ber could rise to 50 per­cent of all m‑commerce retail­ers by next year.

3. Increased Number & Use Of Apps

About 42 per­cent of mobile sales are now made from mobile apps, while near­ly 58 per­cent come from web­sites on smart­phones and tablets.

The num­ber of apps offered by top retail­ers and the num­ber of retail­ers offer­ing apps have each increased sig­nif­i­cant­ly. And it’s easy to see why: on aver­age, mobile retail­ers will gain about 30 per­cent of it’s mobile sales from apps, and this is expect­ed to con­tin­ue to increase next year.

Providing A 100% Mobile Experience

Over­all, Inter­net Retail­er’s report reveals a clear trend: that con­sumers are increas­ing­ly using their mobile devices, and are becom­ing less reliant on desk­tops to make online pur­chas­es.

In many cas­es, retail­ers aren’t far away from pro­vid­ing com­plete­ly mobile expe­ri­ences, where users have all the choic­es that a retail­er offers, via any cho­sen device.

As Paul Cousineau, direc­tor of mobile shop­ping at Amazon.com states in the report:

[Ama­zon wants] a cus­tomer to be able to have 100% of their rela­tion­ship with Ama­zon on any device they choose. … Mobile is a trans­for­ma­tive tech­nol­o­gy. As our per­cent­age of cus­tomers adopt­ing mobile con­tin­ues to grow, mobile can no longer be a lim­it­ed sub­set of fea­tures or prod­ucts. Peo­ple do not put their phone down then go find a desk­top to do some­thing. They use their phone. And we think with clever use of func­tions and design, it is pos­si­ble to give mobile cus­tomers 100%.”

This arti­cle first appeared on the Linkdex blog.


Are you see­ing a rise in the num­ber of con­sumers using their mobile devices to pur­chase from you?

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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