Citrix this week released a quarterly report detailing a variety of statistics related to the mobile industry, including statistics on application usage and e-commerce habits. This infographic was especially revealing about trends in commerce from mobile phones (m-commerce):
Pictures are certainly worth a thousand words (and probably more in this case), but let’s analyze a few of the key points from this graphic.
First, China’s m-commerce dwarfs that of other countries. People tend to think of China as an emerging market, but here China is the clear leader. It makes sense for companies like Apple to work hard to break into a market that is so willing to spend money with the tap of a button.
The majority of Amazon.com and Groupon shopping is done in mobile browsers instead of with mobile apps. Both have robust dedicated apps, yet EBay leaves them in the dust with an an overwhelming majority choosing to place their bids with an app instead of on a browser.
Page load times have long been acknowledged as important, but these figures reinforce just how critical they are to completing a purchase. Nineteen percebt of shoppers abandon their carts if they load too slowly, but what’s more startling is that almost half (43%) of these people never return to the cart or complete the purchase. Despite 30% of mobile owners giving up on a page if it hasn’t loaded in eight seconds or less, half of all Web pages take more than eight seconds to load. This would indicate that if e-commerce companies invested more in infrastructure to increase load times they could see increased revenue.
What does this mean for the wireless industry? M-commerce companies should throw their full support behind the move toward universal adoption of faster networks such as LTE – the faster the network, the faster the page loads and the more likely customers will be to follow through on purchases.
