The Asia Pacific marketplace is leading the entire world in its smartphone shopping.
According to a recent report, the importance of m-commerce is steadily growing across the Asia Pacific region, to the point that the world is being led by that part of the globe in smartphone shopping.
The report was based on a study that examined the way countries in that area use the channel.
It determined that 55 percent of online shoppers in China had already made at least one purchase over m-commerce during the last quarter of 2012. This implies that China is the single most shopped country in the world over smartphones or tablets in terms of penetration.
When compared to m-commerce rates in North America, China and other Asian countries are far ahead.
In the United States, only 19 percent of mobile device users made a purchase over m-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012. Similarly, in Canada, only 13 percent of online shoppers made a purchase over mobile during that time. This shows that the penetration rate in China is almost three times greater than that of the United States
Estimates from the eMarketer report have shown that there will be 270.9 million Chinese internet users who will be making a purchase online in 2013. This includes the number that will have been made over m-commerce. That same firm has projected that by 2016, that number will increase to break the 423.4 million mark. They believe that mobile will play a very important role in this massive growth.
This trend has been playing out quite similarly across the Asia Pacific region. For instance, in South Korea, 37 percent of online shoppers had made an m-commerce purchase during the 2012 fourth quarter. This rate of adoption was nearly twice as great as that in the United States. Similar trends are also being seen in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Japan and Thailand, each of which has seen far greater penetration than the U.S.
A separate Nielsen study also showed that there are far greater percentages of internet users in the Asia-Pacific region that are looking to their mobile devices to make purchases over m-commerce than there are in other countries around the world.
