Mobile Shopping Nearly Tripled In 2014

Mobile shopping on smartphones and tablets grew 174 percent in 2014, according to analytics vendor Flurry — including a whopping 220 percent jump on Android devices, VentureBeat reported.

That made shopping the fastest-growing category for mobile usage, according to the company’s data. Productivity apps grew by 121 percent year-over-year, messaging and other social app use increased 103 percent, and both fitness and travel apps rose in usage by 89 percent.

Flurry also drilled down into the shopping increase, using data from Android devices in the U.S., including GPS data to identify whether shoppers were at home or away from home.

“Based on this analysis, our mobile shopping behavior is perhaps what we might expect,” Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf wrote in the company’s blog. “We shop on our phones when we are out and about during the day, with shopping app use spiking during the commute time of 9 a.m. and lunchtime at noon. We’re focused on things other than shopping in the afternoon hours (perhaps working to support that shopping habit), but mobile shopping spikes again during prime time at 8 p.m., at home. There are some of us that shop all night into the wee hours of the morning!”

Khalaf added that mobile shopping is particularly good at capitalizing on impulse buys, which may account for anywhere between 15 and 40 percent of all retail sales in the U.S. — and mobile satisfies a shopper’s urge to buy on the spot because the phone is everywhere the shopper is.