Custora E-Commerce Pulse Report

The Custora E-Commerce Pulse Mobile Report analyzed data from more than 100 retailers, 70 million consumers and $10B in transaction revenue to gain a deeper level of understanding into which mobile e-commerce trends marketers should pay the closest attention to.

The report also includes interviews with marketing leaders at online retailers excelling in mobile e-commerce - Nomorerack, Karmaloop, and thredUP - who share practical advice from the front lines.

Highlights include:

• US mobile e-commerce is a $40 billion market, poised to hit $50 billion in 2014. In the past four years, the mobile e-commerce market grew 19-fold: From $2.2 billion in 2010 to $42.8 billion in 2013. This represents 1875% growth over four years, and 111% 4-year CAGR.  2014 is off to a strong start with $12.2 billion in mobile e-commerce sales in Q1 alone; it’s likely that mobile e-commerce will hit $50 billion in 2014.

• Amazon and Samsung are challenging Apple’s e-commerce supremacy. Over the last two years, iPhone’s share of e-commerce orders from mobile phones decreased from 75% in 2012 to 54% as of March 2014.  Samsung phones have grown their share of phone orders over the same time period from 7% to 31%.  iPad still accounts for 80% of tablet e-commerce orders, though share of orders made from Samsung tablets increased from 2% in 2012 to 12% as of March 2014. Amazon has also quickly become an important player, with purchases made on Kindle Fire tablets now accounting for 4.1% of all tablet orders. This bodes well for the just-announced Amazon Fire Phone.

• Email marketing drives mobile purchases - Social Media not so much. Email marketing drove 27% of sales on mobile phones, compared to only 21% on desktop, and 23% on tablet. This is a surprising data point considering the challenges of displaying email correctly on mobile devices, and deep-linking into mobile apps. Social media accounted for only 0.6% of sales on phones and 0.2% on tablets.

• Cross-device shoppers are a small but highly valuable customer segment. As of Q1 2014, just 12% of online shoppers make purchases on more than one device type - however this represents significant growth from only 4% in 2012. This customer segment is also 19% more valuable, in terms of customer lifetime value (CLV), than the average single-device shopper.