These discounts have been sending the channel forward for a number of years now.
Mobile commerce has been driven by coupons sent over smartphones for several years, already having a head start back in 2010, even though this channel represented only 3 percent of online shopping at that time.
However, by the end of the holiday shopping season last year, comScore stats showed the channel spiked to 11 percent.
Last year, mobile commerce represented about $18.6 percent of consumer spending following the holiday shopping season, not including the purchases related to travel such as airline tickets and hotel stays. Those factors are counted separately by comScore.
The mobile commerce trends are still showing that coupons are a primary driver behind that channel.
The latest reports from BI Intelligence are suggesting that smartphone catalogs and coupons are helping to make sure that mobile commerce continues to grow at an explosive rate. In fact, they have been an integral part of the development of this new retail and shopping app environment, which has caused predictions for smartphone and tablet generated retail spending by the end of this year to increase to 15 percent.
The BI Intelligence report provided data that offered considerable insight to the mobile commerce industry as it offered the numbers needed to identify the drivers that were behind this steady and rapid climb. Among the additional facts that were pointed out in the report were the following:
• Mobile commerce coupons are helping online retailers to engage customers and boost their sales. By 2014, it is believe that the number of users of these digital coupons will reach 53.2 million per year.
• The redemption rate of smartphone coupons is 10 percent, which is tremendously greater than the 1 percent redemption rate of paper coupons.
• Mobile commerce is effectively boosting the rate of foot traffic to physical stores and the sales that are occurring offline. Strategies using coupons that are effectively implemented drive even more consumers to head to brick and mortar store locations in order to take advantage of the discounts that they offer, far more so than print coupons.
