It looks like e-commerce is taking a new route these days – via mobile phones. That is more shoppers are doing their daily shopping fix using their mobile phones, says ABI Research’s latest “Mobile Commerce” study which focused on mobile online shopping and mobile payments for virtual goods.
According to the report, mobile shoppers are projected to spend as much as $119 billion on goods and services via their mobile phones. Although the increase is quite significant, overall however this only amounts to 8% of the total e-commerce market. ABI’s report include global forecasts for e-commerce, mobile online shopping as a subset of e-commerce, virtual goods as well as mobile payments for those virtual goods.
ABI’s senior analyst Mark Beccue said that mobile online shopping is getting more common among online shoppers.
“In the United States, mobile online shopping rose from $396 million in 2008 to $1.2 billion in 2009. While definitions of ‘mass market adoption’ vary, a more than threefold increase in one year indicates significant consumer interest.”
Interestingly while the U.S. mobile shopping industry is steadily growing, its current condition still fall way too short of the mobile shopping industry in Japan which reached more than $10 billion in 2009. Europe’s mobile shopping market is steadily growing as well and is expected to surpass the US market by the end of 2010.
Does this mean that U.S. online shoppers don’t use their mobile phones as much as their Japanese or European counterparts before? It seems that it’s not really a problem on the consumers part though.
The report also noted that interests toward smartphone is only starting to build up. Plus support for mobile commerce is websites is also just starting to get a headway recently.