Vouchercodes.co.uk parent company RetailMeNot is behind the international study, which found the UK is Europe’s largest mobile commerce market as 2015 sales in the country will almost double the 8.41bn Brits spent through smartphones and tablets last year.
The trend was given a further jumpstart on 25 February when Barclays revealed its plans to enable individuals and small business to be paid via Twitter handle, noting at the time that 80 per cent of the UK’s 13.5m Twitter users use the social network from their mobiles.
Broken down, the 14.95bn spend is equivalent to 1m spent every 35 minutes throughout the year, or 474 a second. In fact, the UK is such a dominant force in the European mobile commerce market that it will account for 39.4 per cent of all continental mcommerce sales.
The study showed that the UK is 21 per cent bigger than Germany’s 12.4bn spend, 152.5 per cent larger than France’s 5.9bn spend, both in respective second and third place behind Britain. Poland, meanwhile, is the smallest market and is set to generate just 600m through mobile sales tantamount to the spend via mobile devices in the UK every fortnight.
Giulio Montemagno, SVP of international at RetailMeNot, said: Mobile is now the driving force behind ecommerce growth, accounting for more than one in four pounds spent online in the UK this year. However the true impact of mobile on retail is much greater than this.
Our research suggests that mobile is becoming a shopping companion for many Brits. Almost three-quarters of mobile users regularly visit retailers’ websites to browse or make purchases, with some retailers seeing as many as one in two visits to their websites come through mobile. Faced with some high rates of growth and a huge opportunity to drive sales, ignoring mobile is simply not an option for retailers in 2015.
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Despite the surge of mobile activity, PCs are still the top choice for consumers when making online purchases and will account for 71.4 per cent of UK online sales in 2015, however, that’s down from 81.3 per cent in 2014 and sales via PCs will only grow at a rate of two per cent.
Meanwhile, mobile-based spending is set to account for 28.6 per cent of UK online purchases this year up from 18.7 per cent in 2014 broken down between 16.5 per cent on smartphones and 12.1 per cent on tablets.
Montemagno added: Mobile must be felt in everything that retailers do. Consumers dont think of retailers as having online, offline or mobile channels. They just want to shop and find the best offers in the way that is most convenient for them.
Savvy retailers have recognised this and are already beginning to make use of new technologies such as geolocalisation, beacons, and mobile coupons, to target consumers through the device they use most and to provide a seamless purchase path and a truly multichannel shopping experience.
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