It’s not exactly a revelation that mobile devices have taken over in a permanent way. The more relevant questions are to what extent and what does mobile mean for the future of web commerce? Time magazine recently did an international poll of 5,000 Americans, Britons, South Koreans, Chinese, Indians, South Africans, Indonesians, and Brazilians on their mobile usage. 84% say they couldn’t go one day without their phones and 20% check their phone every 10 minutes. Sound familiar?
For marketers, it sounds a lot like the best billboard ever made: the opportunity to capture that many eyes every ten minutes of every day for a consistent seven days a week. European telecom giant O2 recently ranked cell phone app usage and found that the most frequent use of the smartphone isn’t actually phone calls at all. The phone feature is really just an app itself and when ranked with other apps in terms of minutes/day usage, comes in fifth:
1. Browsing the internet
2. Checking social networks
3. Playing games
4. Listening to music
5. Making calls
6. Checking/writing emails
7. Text messaging
8. Watching TV/films
9. Reading books
10. Taking photographs
Clearly, the smartphone has little to do with placing a call. Kayla Green, digital strategy director at Saatchi & Saatchi, estimates that 15% of all web traffic comes from people accessing websites with mobile devices. She has also found that 86% of smartphone and tablet owners use these devices while doing something else like watching TV. 40% of smartphone owners use their phones while running errands. Dwindling are the days of web searches, price checking and shopping from a desktop. Optimizing your website for smartphone and tablet usage is essential for the mobile, multi-tasking world we live in.
