By Chuck Martin
The numbers highlighting the growth of mobile commerce just keep coming in.
First we saw Forrester’s projections of total transactions from mobile devices reaching $293 billion by 2018, as I wrote about here yesterday (Mobile Commerce & Life Around the Transaction).
By the end of this year, smartphone and tablet sales are expected to total $114 billion, according to that forecast.
Now comes a new benchmark from comScore estimating the amount of money actually moving through mobile on a quarterly basis.
It shows mobile commerce spending on smartphones and tablets at $7 billion for the first quarter of this year, an increase of 23% from a year ago.
As context, comScore measured $56 billon in desktop-based U.S. retail e-commerce spending in the first quarter of this year, for 14 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.
Unlike many other mobile commerce studies, comScore found more purchasing via smartphone than tablet.
For example, of the $293 billion of total mobile transactions projected in four years, Forrester sees smartphones accounting for $74 billion with $219 billion coming from tablets.
Of course, in that study as in many others smartphones and tablets are lumped together and both considered mobile devices.
For the first quarter of this year, comScore estimates buying from a smartphone accounting for 62% of sales compared to 38% from tablets.
In the new quarterly numbers, commerce from smartphones is higher than tablets because smartphones have twice the penetration of tablets and significantly higher overall usage, comScore tells me. On a per usage basis, tablets are higher than smartphones.
The reality is that the devices are used differently, such as smartphones on-the-go and tablets on Wi-Fi at home, among many other factors.
No matter the actual measurement, the trend is quite clear.
The numbers are simply a reflection of the behavioral transformation in how people buy things.
Chuck Martin is Editor of the mCommerce Daily at MediaPost and writes the daily MobileShopTalk column. He is the author of “Mobile Influence,” “The Third Screen,” and “The Smartphone Handbook.” He is CEO of Mobile Future Institute. Chuck Martin is a frequent Mobile Keynote Speaker and Mobile Marketing Speaker internationally. He also addresses Social Media in Mobile.
