“Europe M-Commerce 2017” is the title of a new market report released by secondary research specialist in Hamburg, yStats.com. The report synthesizes information about M-Commerce sales and mobile shoppers in the top 10 European markets, while also highlighting important global mobile trends. Among the conclusions drawn in this publication is that smartphones are posed to overtake tablets as the leading mobile shopping device.
Close to one-third of Internet users in Europe made purchases from mobile devices in 2016, according to a survey cited in this report by yStats.com. Across advanced and emerging markets of this region, M-Commerce sales are growing rapidly, increasing their share of overall B2C E-Commerce sales. In the UK, the region’s largest country by online retail sales, more than one-third of E-Commerce was generated on mobile in 2016, with a high double-digit share of digital buyers making purchases via smartphones and tablets.
Among the key mobile trends in the region is smartphones outpacing tablets in terms of mobile sales growth. The smartphone share of online purchases grew faster than that of tablets in countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, and even overtook tablets in the UK by the end of 2016, according to some estimates included in yStats.com’s publication. Still, tablets had a higher conversion rate than smartphones in this country, reflecting the fact that Internet-enabled mobile phones are increasingly used for browsing products and comparing prices. On both devices, apps were chosen over browsers by mobile shoppers in Germany and Russia.
Regarding the product preferences of mobile shoppers in Europe, clothing was the top product category in Russia and the UK, while books were leading in Belgium and Germany, as of 2016. Amazon was the leader of the M-Commerce space in countries such as France and the UK, while in Russia a majority of mobile shoppers bought from AliExpress. A survey of top online retailers in Austria, cited in this report from yStats.com, revealed that above three-quarters of them had a mobile website or app. Nevertheless, usability is still an issue in mobile commerce, as a quarter of European shoppers would switch from mobile to desktop for purchase as they found page navigation to be easier on computers.
