Shoppers spent well over $30 billion online over this past holiday season and a large percentage of that was done via mobile devices. Often consumers will finalize online purchases via their desktop or laptop computer, but a rapidly expanding number are using mobile applications or mobile web sites while in-store and those shoppers are driving the future of mobile application commerce.
New surveys from GfKRoper and SapientNitro state that a whopping 80% of smartphone owners used their mobile devices while shopping during the 2012 holiday season. This is very solid growth for mobile shopping when compared to the past.
Other findings from these surveys include: 80% of mobile users accessed mobile applications or websites to research or browse products (15% higher than last year), 74% of mobile users completed at least one purchase via mobile device over the holidays (19% higher than the previous year) and 56% of mobile users looked to customer reviews and ratings to make a purchase decisions (16% higher than last year).
Motorola’s research suggests that younger shoppers are the most likely to use mobile devices for shopping and that only about a third of older consumers use mobile devices to shop. Their survey data indicates some of the reason behind the growth of mobile applications usage for commerce, suggesting that users often feel that they have a better chance of finding reliable information via mobile app or mobile web site than via retail employees.
Recently comScore release survey data that smartphones are now used by 55% of mobile users in Europe and by 52% of people in the United States. This works out to be over 121 million users and about half of those people reported using mobile browsers or downloading apps for a formidable market that is growing on a daily basis.
Mobile has changed the way consumers shop this past year and will have a huge impact in 2013, as even more consumers switch to smart phones and take advantage of mobile applications.
TechBargains states in a recent survey that most of the shoppers that are using mobile apps while shopping [90%] are checking prices and looking for digital coupons while they are in the store. Compared to two years ago, TechBargains states that then just over half of them [58%] used mobile applications to do so, while a year ago 73% are doing so. Additionally it is important to note that just about 80% are using tablets to complete purchases.
Key to note from their survey is that 83% of iPad owners make mobile purchases, 76% of iPhone owners make mobile purchases and 71% of Android owners do. Additionally 73% of tablet owners will use their device to do product research and 71% of tablet owners will utilize their devices to get stock information.
This shows a definite trend that consumers are more apt to buy products from Android devices than they were in the past, closing the gap with Apple devices.
What trends should you watch for or be working into your app development project? Here are the big ones that we think you should be keeping an eye on:
With the success of Siri we will see is mobile application developers pushing more voice recognition features in the applications for various mobile devices. Voice capabilities are starting to work their way into more and more iPhone apps and Android apps and they could be a big item in 2013 and really change the face of the mobile application market. With voice recognition you can really streamline tasks and this is a key area to look towards as a next step in mobile integration.
Another key area to look at is ways that you can leverage data to create a more relevant user experience. The opportunity to collect the data is available, are you planning to collect an utilize it? By doing so you will be able to create better user experiences and deliver better opportunities to advertisers to maximize their ad spend value.
Analyst firm International Data Corporation recently released their analysis of the mobile phone market and it shows Android to be far out in the lead of other smart phone mobile operating systems with 68.3 percent of the market in 2012. Apple’s iOS for the iPhone is a distant second at 18.8 percent of the market and all other operating systems are below 5 percent.
Interesting to note, yet not surprising, is that almost all the growth in the mobile phone market is in smart phones.
Projections by International Data Corporation anticipate Android to remain the leader through at least 2016 in this report but with share dropping to anticipated 63.8 percent of the market in the year 2016. They anticipate Android continuing to lead the market because it is available to sell to a great mass of customers, iPhones are seen as a premium product that are “…cost prohibitive for some users within many emerging markets”. International Data Corporation suggest that if Apple wants to increase their amount of market share, that they will need to add lower-priced models into their product mix.
BlackBerry is estimated by International Data Corporation to maintain about their current percent of the market based on their “…pockets of strength in higher-growth emerging markets.” They are not anticipated to have much of an impact on the market beyond that though. They participant to watch is Windows Phone. Right now they have a 2.6% share of the market but with Microsoft’s strong financial position, brand recognition and multiple handset makers, they are projecting Windows Phone share jumping to 11.4% in 2016.
This clearly affects the decision making process when it comes to the mixture of apps to develop for your business. Developing Android applications and iPhone applications are “no-brainers” but business’ need to start considering adding Windows Phone applications into their marketing mix to take advantage of that emerging market.