This form of advertising is encouraging more people to look to their smartphones when they shop.
In 2010, m-commerce made up only 3 percent of online shopping as a whole, but by the time the end of the 2012 holiday season arrived, that figure had spiked upward to reach 11 percent, which represented approximately $18 billion in consumer spending.
Mobile merchandising trends are rapidly changing and consumers are catching on very rapidly.
These new mobile marketing trends are starting to focus on bringing very practical and attractive elements to m-commerce. Among the most successful is mobile coupons, with smartphone and tablet friendly catalogs also contributing to this trend. BI Intelligence released a report that indicated that these, and several other factors, are not only causing smartphones and tablets to grow quickly as part of the shopping experience, but that it will continue to head in this direction.
The discount and other shopping opportunities offered by m-commerce are being used in a very specific way.
Consumers are using their devices specifically to help them to apply the convenience and practicality that m-commerce has to offer. They are integrating this into the behaviors that they have already established so that it is not simply developing as a channel that is independent from any other, but that contributes to the overall shopping experience, regardless of where the final purchase is made.
In this sense, mobile coupons are now playing an important role in retail m-commerce. In fact, according to the report from BI Intelligence, 41 percent of the users of mobile coupons had redeemed them while in a grocery store. Similarly, another 41 percent said that their redemption of the offers occurred in a department store, while slightly less (39 percent) had redeemed theirs in clothing stores.
Last year, it was reported that there were 305 billion consumer packaged goods coupons (CPG) that were distributed in the United States. This includes both print and digital (over various channels, including m-commerce). This number remained about the same over the figure from 2011. That said, digital format remained less than 1 percent of the total. It is expected that due to their successes over mobile, this trend is about to dramatically change and that the figures for 2013 will represent quite a different story.
