Fri, 02/28/2014 – 09:14 by Admin Data from e-commerce platform
ShopVisible’s 2013 year in review report argues that mobile devices (smartphones + tablets) were responsible for 30% of all traffic to its e-commerce clients’ last year. Mobile devices, however, drove far fewer e-commerce sales (15%) compared with their traffic percentage.
To determine how representative of the broader market these ShopVisible figures were I consulted StatCounter. That site confirmed that 30% of traffic in the US market is now coming from smartphones and tablets. The percentage is nearly identical globablly. For retailers and those in the “local” segment, the percentages are 10 or more points higher.
Source: StatCounter US platform traffic comparison Europe’s mobile share of traffic is lower, probably because of slower Eastern European smartphone adoption. According to StatCounter below are the relative percentages of internet traffic by platform (rounded):
US market- Desktop: 70%
- Smartphones/mobile: 21%
- Tablets: 9%
Europe - Desktop: 80%
- Smartphones/mobile: 13%
- Tablets: 7%
Globally- Desktop: 72%
- Smartphones/mobile: 22%
- Tablets: 6%
Yesterday the Pew Research Center put out a survey based
report (1,000 US adults) that reflected on the 25 years of the internet since Tim Berners-Lee wrote his
seminal paper about a distributed network of computers and documents linked together by “hypertext.”
Here are the high-level US data from that report:
- Computer use: 81%
- Mobile phones (all types): 90%
- Internet use: 87%
- Smartphone ownership: 64% (others say 65%)
We can anticipate that smartphone ownership will eventually approach 100% of the mobile population. That may take three to five years however. In the near term we’ll see 70% smartphone ownership (at least) by the end of 2014.
An increasing number of smartphone and tablet owners prefer or use those devices first vs. PCs. However the majority of e-commerce transactions (not counting things like restaurant reservations and Uber payments) are likely to continue to take place on desktop computers.
The conversation about the role of mobile vs. PCs shouldn’t be an “or conversation” it’s an “and conversation.”
