With more than 4 billion people equipped with Mobile phones across the globe, providing Mobility as a channel for customers has become imperative for today’s B2C companies. Smartphones have re-defined the way people used to connect with the companies before. Today’s retailers want to offer their customers Mobile phone capabilities to enrich their shopping experience on-the-move. The use of Mobile phones for various shopping activities varies considerably on the factors like consumer’s age bracket, type of phone used (Smartphone vs. Basic Mobile phone), presence of data plan for internet etc.

Though there is so much hype about moving to Mobile, many retailers are still not fully convinced about it. I have put down below few statistics of Mobile usage in retail which can help Retailers take informed decision on their move towards Mobility. These statistics are collected from various analysts & market experts across the globe.

Findings in the US market:

  • Gartner predicts nearly 75% of U.S. Smartphone users intend to browse a retailer’s Internet site in the next six months, and half of them intend to download a retailer’s apps.
  • Two-thirds of U.S. Smartphone users would use Smartphone in the next six months to check prices, read reviews and compare product information — inside and outside the store.
  • Mobile Commerce sales of physical goods is increasing rapidly – $1 billion apiece reported in sales revenues from eBay and Amazon from the mobile channel alone last year
  • M-Commerce transactions to reach US$37 billion by 2016 – Informa telecoms & Media
  • As per Forrester Research, 29% of retailers have already implemented Mobile strategy in US

Findings from the UK market:

  • UK consumers use their Mobile phones to find the store location as the most likely activity
  • As per Gartner prediction, three-quarters of Smartphone users in UK intend to browse retailer’s Mobile-enabled site and 50% of them plan to download their apps from App store.
  • 63% of consumers in UK want to search for products or get detailed product information via Smartphone.
  • In the age segment of 18-to-25 year olds, 88% of them plan to use Mobile for one or the other shopping activities

Findings from the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) market:

  •  Consumers in BRIC countries use Mobile phones for shopping activities which influence store purchases instead of performing transactions on Mobile device.
  • More than 75% of BRIC consumers use Mobile phones for store location, delivery status and browse Mobile-enabled website of retailers.
  • Product price comparison in stores is one of the less likely activities being performed by consumers in these countries

In the next blog post, we will look into how Retailers can build their Mobile strategy, the factors to be pondered upon and the business goals to be set in order to define their Mobility roadmap.

Note: Most of the statistics mentioned above is being taken from Mobile consumer shopping preferences survey being done by Gartner in various geographies.