My September
18 short blog post pointed to the app market, which is now thriving thanks
to the ubiquity of wireless broadband. Of course, sophisticated smartphones and
other mobile devices are just as critical to these developments than the data
networks and infrastructure facilities.
Data just released by
comScore sheds some light on the centrality of smartphones to the expansion of
mobile commerce—sometimes know simply as "M commerce." "From
Brick-and-Mortar to Mobile Click-and-Order: Which Retailers are Carving Out
Space in the M-Commerce Market?" ranks the highest-visited mobile
retail sites and also looks at the percentages of of mobile retail shoppers
among smartphone owners. According to comScore: "In July 2012, 85.9 million
people age 18 and older visited a retail destination via a mobile browser or
app on their smartphone, representing 4 in every 5 smartphone owners."
To put some perspective on
just how rapid this rate of growth is, now consider what the FCC's 2011 Wireless
Competition Report had to say
about mobile commerce on smartphones: Data from comScore suggest that the
increasing prevalence of smartphones may correspond to a growth in mobile
shopping, as 10 percent of smartphones and 12 percent of iPhones have been used
to access online retail sites, compared to only one percent of traditional
handsets.
While smartphones and mobile retail websites are
the beneficiaries of an unregulated, free-market environment, the same can't
quite be said regarding some of the critical inputs for the wireless market. To
repeat the policy priorities for furthering the mobile commerce boom: more
flexible
spectrum
must be made available for commercial use and regulatory
barriers must be reduced for building
and upgrading wireless cell sites.
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