M-Commerce to gain more than 50% of traffic share

PricePanda records large growth of mobile traffic share

Berlin, March 20th, 2014 – The importance of M-commerce in the world economy has grown tremendously, as the traffic deriving from retail websites has been augmented from mobile devices. Smartphones and tablets have gained popularity and now are people´s everyday necessities. But what do people do when typing on their mobile devices? As the share of mobile traffic on its website has been growing constantly over the last year and now accounts for 45%, PricePanda (www.pricepanda.com), the leading price comparison website, predicts that soon the majority of visits on retail websites will come from mobile devices. Reacting to the growing popularity of M-Commerce PricePanda launched a mobile app that is available for iOS and Android last October and a mobile optimized website, both of which are regularly updated.

Christian Schiller, co-founder of PricePanda: “As M-commerce empowers users to make quick shopping decisions at any time and place, it satisfies the needs of our today´s society for flexibility. In November last year only a third of the entire traffic on our website originated from smartphones and tablets. We now have a record of 45% and are optimistic that this growth is not about to stop. In last December, especially the Christmas shopping period greatly pushed M-commerce, resulting in mobile traffic rocketing by 6%. Until now the mobile traffic on PricePanda gained two percentage points each month in this year. If this growth will continue in June the 50% mark will be broken creating a huge drive of traffic.”

Along with the growth of traffic through M-commerce, sales have grown, too. A study by research company Emarketer revealed that M-commerce sales made up 16% of the entire retail E-commerce sales last year. In the future, this share is expected to grow by three percentage points per year up to a quarter in 2016.

Therefore M-commerce will become a fundamental part of the economy as it contributes in two ways: On the one hand people make purchases from their mobile devices and consequently push online sales, but on the other hand people use their gadgets as a mobile research tool before carrying out the transaction from their home desktop or in a shop. What is evidently shown in the study by Emarketer is the difference between smartphone and tablet contributions towards retail M-commerce sales. 62% shares of all retail M-commerce sales deriving from tablets are outperforming smartphones and within three years tablets are predicted extend its lead with gaining another 10% of share in the next three years.