The online payments giant has released its data for both smartphone based and traditional online shopping.
There is no doubt that there is a future in online shopping, but what the latest data is showing is that mobile commerce is already the preferred method of making an online purchase and that smartphones are the top device over tablets and laptop or desktop computers when shopping outside of the home.
This new study was conducted by PayPal and the results were just recently released.
Within PayPal’s study, it looked into the mobile commerce trends in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. What it found was that within those regions, smartphone based shopping is rising at a phenomenal rate. The Middle East is among the regions that is embracing this technology the most quickly in the world.
Mobile commerce transactions are already representing 10 percent of all online shopping.
Though this statistic is comparable to the mobile commerce share of online shopping that is seen in much of the rest of the world, the growth rate in the Middle East is indicating that by 2015, it will have grown to nearly 20 percent. That is much faster than the predictions being made for many other regions. This will also mean that the market will have grown from $1.3 billion this year to $3 billion by the end of 2015.
The survey that provided the data within the PayPal mobile commerce and online shopping report involved the participation of 1811 shoppers in the region. Among them, 511 of those consumers were from the UAE. Another 800 were from Saudi Arabia, while 500 were from Qatar. This makes the PayPal research one of the largest surveys into online shopping trends that have ever been conducted in the Middle East.
In the market growth predictions segment of the study, PayPal predicted that a considerable amount of the online spending in the region would occur through mobile commerce channels. In Saudi Arabia, it predicts that there will be $700 million, with $100 million in Qatar, and $1.5 billion in the UAE. In the UAE, it should be noted that the majority of spending will be driven by tablet adoption.
