The holiday season which began with Cyber Monday on December 2nd 2013 has just ended and analyzing the impact on mobile commerce sales and location based services unveils some very interesting trends.

Firstly, at the macro level:

• Online shopping increased in the USA in 2013 by over 16% compared to 2012.

• From a mobility perspective, almost a third of all online sales (29%) were made from Smartphones or Tablets.

Clearly there are changes in the online marketplace, but in order to examine this a little further, let's look at a few key questions to help understand what is happening in this marketplace:

1. What are the major trends?
2. Is mobile commerce just a US phenomenon?
3. What impact does location based services have?
4. Where are the main benefits coming from analytics?
5. How is privacy fitting in to all this and how is the attitude of mobile consumers evolving?

Trends 2013: 

As already mentioned, the increase in smartphone purchases is growing rapidly, and increased by 33% in 2013 over 2012.

Even more interesting is that, for Christmas Day 2013, 83% of online mobile sales came from only 16% of Android devices. What does this say, especially as Android has 51% of the US Smartphone market?

Clearly it appears that iOS is a market that can be monetized far more easily. Maybe it is a demographic factor? regardless, it is a hugely significant aspect to consider when .......

In the UK, specifically on the 26^thof December, Mobile traffic grew to 58% of all online traffic, an increase of 42% over 2012. Sales completed via mobile devices were also strong, growing 63% year over year, and exceeding 45% of total online sales.

Expansion of Mobile commerce:

While the US had always been to the fore in mobile commerce, the holiday season in 2013 saw some significant increases in other parts of the world.

Some statistics from the UK makes very interesting reading:

• John Lewis reported online sales were 22.6% up with their Click & Collect program and were up 61.8% on last year for the five weeks up to 28th December 2013. -This represented 31.8% of the total John Lewis business during this period.
• House of Fraser enjoyed its best Christmas trading period on record, driven largely by a jump in online sale,s up by almost 57.7%.
• Retail chain Debenhams has reported that online sales increased by 27% for the 17 week period to 28th of December 2013.

In the UK, Smartphones drove almost 30% of all online traffic with 28% for tablets. However tablet users drove almost 30% of online sales, which was nearly twice that of smartphones users, who drove 16%. In addition AOV (average order value) on tablets was