• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, September 29, 2011

Holiday shoppers may have limited spending capacity this year, but they will be using their phones early and often during the holiday season to make smarter buying decisions, says mobile ad network Mojiva in its latest user survey of predominantly smartphone owners.

When asked what types of product information they would find their phone most useful to obtain, 56% cited product information and the same number targeted coupons and sale info. More than half of users (23%) expect their phones to be useful in getting product reviews, and 51% would expect to find store hours. The findings were just published in Mojiva's holiday edition of its Mobile Audience Guide.

But perhaps the most encouraging momentum is toward mobile purchasing itself. Almost a third (32%) believed that buying products on their phone would be helpful. There seems to be a considerable willingness at least to entertain the possibility of buying merchandise on mobile devices.

When asked what kinds of products they could see themselves purchasing this coming shopping season on their mobile device, 52% said toys and games, 51% said electronics, including media; 40% said clothing; and 27% would consider booking flights or hotel rooms.

Mojiva finds that 21% of mobile customers still do not feel comfortable making holiday purchases on their devices, and this is about the same as previous surveys.

Still, when it comes to holiday purchases, as much as 40% of mobile users are comfortable spending at least $50 on a single gift via a mobile purchase.

To be sure, the Mojiva sample set skews higher on the handset end. While about 43% of mobile subscribers generally now own a smartphone, 73% of this sample had the more advanced devices and presumably may evidence more enthusiastic attitudes toward the role of their devices.

Comfort levels with e-commerce took many years to improve -- mainly because it represented a wholly new digital channel where security and vendor reliability were persistent concerns among consumers. But on mobile, consumers generally are interacting with familiar entities with whom they already have digital relationships like popular e-retailers and the mobile carriers themselves.

In a recent market report on m-commerce, Amazon was the clear leader in mobile sales, both because of its seamless mobile experiences and for the relationship it has already established with users. Likewise, eBay -- which claims billions in mobile sales already -- is in a strong position to move its existing base to mobile.

In other words, the comfort zone for m-commerce is likely to be considerably closer than we expected only a few years ago.