Purchases via smartphone hit record numbers as barcode scanners allow price comparison on the move
Post-Christmas bargain hunters have ushered mobile shopping into the mainstream, with retailers reporting a big rise in customers using smartphones to compare prices and snap up sales offers online.
Mobile traffic to the John Lewis online clearance sale has soared 119% on last year's levels and the amount of cash spent online from mobile phones was up 46% since the sale began at 5pm on Christmas Eve.
"Mobile has reached a scale now where all retailers have to take it seriously," said Jonathon Brown, head of online selling for John Lewis. "Customers' behaviours have changed. The transaction volume we've had in the last few days has surprised all of us."
As consumers swooped on discounted items – with laptops, flat screen televisions, Dyson vacuum cleaners and bed linen among the best sellers – there were 356,000 mobile visitors to the John Lewis site from the start of the sale to Boxing Day, out of a total 2.9m digital visits.
The trend was being driven by rising numbers of internet connected phones and tablet computers. By August, more than 46% of UK mobile subscribers were using a smartphone and Apple estimated that 4m-5m new iPads were turned on this Boxing Day.
During this year's Christmas shopping season, 15% of people in Britain logging on to a retailer's website are expected to have done so from a mobile device, be it a smartphone or a tablet computer, according to data gathered from the websites of 150 leading retailers by IT group IBM.
Of all online sales, 11% were made from a mobile internet connection in October 2011, according to IBM – up from 3.1% in the same month last year.
Online auction firm eBay handled 10% of transactions from phones, with one item a second selling via mobile in Britain during the peak Christmas shopping period this year. eBay predicted purchasing from mobiles would rise 150% globally, from $2bn in 2010 to $5bn (£3.2bn) by this new year's eve.
"We're seeing our mobile business grow in triple digits at the moment so mobile sales as a proportion of overall UK sales are likely to have increased significantly in 2011," said a spokeswoman for the auction site.
The eBay mobile app has been downloaded 50m times and shoppers are increasingly using it not just to bid and buy, but to do their research by checking prices before committing to a purchase.
Price comparison is emerging as a major mobile shopping activity, with retailers including Amazon, eBay and John Lewis all offering barcode scanners as part of their mobile apps.
Amazon customers can use their smartphone camera to photograph a barcode on the shelves of any other retailer's bricks and mortar outlet, then check the price against the same item in Amazon's store.
During its clearance sale, John Lewis has introduced virtual shop windows at its stores in cities including London, Liverpool and Edinburgh. Customers passing by can use an iPhone to scan the barcodes of items displayed, which calls up a link to the relevant page on the mobile website so that the purchase can be made without setting foot in the store.
"Mobile shopping is dramatically more significant this year than it ever has been before," said Richard Dodd, British Retail Consortium (BRC) head of media. "People are now carrying round access to a whole world of price and product information they couldn't have before and that means retail is an even more competitive business."
The BRC-Google online retail monitor, published in October, showed that while the rate of growth for online retail has slowed this year to about 10%, mobile is booming. In the third quarter of the year, one in ten retail searches were happening on mobile devices, with the desktop search total increasing 35% year on year compared to a 168% boom in mobile inquiries. "The most notable thing within online retailing is this really rapid increase in the use of mobile devices," said Dodd.