• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, September 20, 2012

Shopping is the killer app for most smartphone users, as four out of five of them go to a retail site at least once a month, according to the latest comsScore survey. In July, that meant that 85.9 million unique visitors hit retailers via mobile phones in July. The figures only underscore what we already have come to know in the past year: mobile look-ups have become a reflex among smartphone-wielding shoppers.

And the early winners are the endemic digital e-retailers. Amazon is dominant, with a remarkable 49,636,000 uniques in July, reaching 45.6% of the smartphone population. Its nearest competitor for m-retail mindshare is eBay, with 32,583,000 uniques or 30.6% share. Multichannel retailers lagged behind while still delivering strong presence and dominating the rest of the chart. Apple, WalMart, Target and Best Buy and Ticketmaster lead the rest of the pack, which is composed almost exclusively of brands with brick-and-mortar. A notable exception to the rule is the small-merchant crafts collective Etsy. comScore was measuring traffic through both mobile Web and apps.

Source: comScore (Total U.S. smartphone users, age 18+ on iOS/Android/RIM platforms)

comScore also found that overall Android smartphones are responsible for more traffic to most of the major retail sites than iOS, largely because of the platform’s greater reach. But most of the major retail brands enjoy a higher penetration among iPhone users than among Android. For the entire retail category, in fact, 90.6% of iPhone users visited a retail site or app in July, compared to 82.1% of Android owners.  

Women and men are relatively equal in terms of visiting retail sites on their phones, but women consume 56.1% of the total minutes spent on these sites. And not surprisingly, the demographics skew younger for mobile retail audiences. On smartphones more than half of the retail audience is 34 or younger, and a third are between 25 and 34.