1 in 7 EU citizens orders online via smartphone

The mobile retail audience in Europe grew by 43 percent over the past year, with 20 percent of smartphone users visiting online retail sites and apps using their mobile phone. Also 1 in 7 smartphone users from the five leading European markets (the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain)have completed a retail transaction on their phone in a month.

ComScore today released an overview of mobile phone usage across the aforementioned European countries. It reports that the number of EU5 smartphone owners that visited an online retail site or app via their device has increased with 2.8 percentage points in the past year. Spain grew the most, as its number of smartphone owners accessing an online retail website or app increased by 66.5 percent to almost 3.3 million people doing this. Italy ranked second with now 5.6 million smartphone owners accessing those sites on their mobile device (+61.3 percent). If we just look at the audience size, with 9.9 million Germany has the largest number of smartphone users accessing online retail sites.

The most popular in-store activity performed by European smartphone owners seems to be taking a picture of a product whilst in a physical retail store. Nearly a quarter of users did so during the examined month. 14.3 percent sent a picture of a product to family or friends to help them make a decision, while 14 percent called or texted their friends of family about a product.

Top 5 products ordered online via smartphone
Back to the online purchasing of products via a mobile device: the number of Europeans doing this has increased by 37 percent over the year from 16.6 million users in August 2012 to 22.8 million in August 2013. The top 5 products and services ordered via a smartphone consists of clothing and accessories (5.4%), consumer electronics (3.8%), books (3.8%), tickets (3.4%) and personal care or hygiene products (2.6%).