Despite being the smallest of the three major commerce channels in terms of transactions, mobile is arguably the most important.
Brick-and-mortar still captures almost nine in 10 retail dollars in the US, while desktop gets the lion’s share of digital transactions. But as the link between digital and physical worlds, mobile wields disproportionate influence over how people shop and buy.
It’s also increasingly how they transact when shopping online. “This holiday season, we anticipate mobile making up more than 50% of orders—which would be a first,” said Rob Garf, vice president of strategy and insights at Salesforce.
And in the battleground for mobile attention, it’s all about the app. App usage accounted for the vast majority of mobile time spent for leading online retailers like Amazon (76%), Walmart (81%) and Etsy (71%)—far eclipsing the mobile web, according to Comscore data covering the first five months of 2019.
But not every retailer has it as easy as well-known, multicategory ecommerce merchants. Smartphone real estate is scarce, as many users tend to only download apps they expect to use regularly so as not to crowd their phones. Research from Pymnts.com and LISNR indicates that US mobile app users are most likely to resist downloading shopping apps because they have too many already (46.3%).