Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in shopping within brick and mortar locations.
Though it has become very clear that m-commerce is growing in its importance among retail businesses, as many of the large players scramble to optimize their websites and provide apps that simplify the shopping experience, it is only now that trends are beginning to truly emerge.
This is providing the type of guidance that businesses need to cater to what consumers expect of them.
A mobile analytics company called Flurry has just released a report that has coined the term “app & mortar” to mirror the concept of “bricks and clicks” that first made its appearance in the late 1990’s. This term makes reference to the increasing role of m-commerce and the use of mobile applications while actually inside physical stores – and the challenges that this has presented to retailers who are trying to determine how to best serve smartphone consumers.
The report provided both insight about m-commerce and confirmations about what was already known.
The report provided the details of an analysis that was conducted on the time that consumers spent using over 1,800 different Android and iOS shopping apps in December of last year, in comparison with their behaviors a month beforehand. What they found was that retailers by far had the most rapidly growing category of m-commerce apps.
Retail apps time expenditures increased by a massive 525 percent year over year. However, online marketplaces also experienced a considerable growth (though not nearly as fast) at 178 percent.
Retailers also saw the largest increases in the amount of time that was being spent within the various m-commerce apps. In December of last year, shoppers spent 27 percent of their app time using retail applications. This was an increase of 12 percent over the year before at the same time.
The improvements that have been experienced by the retail m-commerce apps have, however, come at the expense of daily deal apps and online marketplaces, which both saw a year over year decline, according to the report. The amount of time that people were spending at online marketplaces fell from having been 25 percent in December 2011, to 20 percent last year in the same month. Daily deals sites dropped from having been 20 percent to 13 percent.
