With mobile commerce continuing to gather pace through the performance channel, it has been interesting to look back across the past few weeks to analyse the role mobile played over the Easter bank holiday. March stats indicate that traffic through mobile devices reached 21.1% while sales were at 14.2%.

A greater proportion of US iPhone owners use mobile commerce apps than their Android counterparts with eBay being the most popular overall, according to a new study.

Some Giant Eagle stores have started blocking access to self-checkout for anyone other than loyalty card holders while they are using their cards. It's an interesting move, in that it simultaneously discourages self-checkout usage but also gathers far more information about those who do opt to self-checkout, CRM-style.

RaceTrac Petroleum Inc. is the latest convenience retailer to join the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) single-platform mobile wallet initiative. MCX is backed by more than 30 merchants that process more than $1 trillion in payments annually and operate nearly 80,000 stores.

An Australian e-commerce startup that basically lets consumers one-click buy an item from offline channels has raised $1 million in seed funding in a round led by the private investment firm backed by a PayPal co-founder and early Facebook backer, among other investors.

PayPal is significantly expanding the availability of in-store mobile services for merchants such as in-aisle selling and ordering ahead via a partnership with Magento, whose 150,000 merchants and community of developers can now take advantage of PayPal Here to complete in-store transactions via a mobile phone or tablet attachment.

The new Visual Fashion Finder from Cortexica compares a retailer's catalog images to a shopper's photos. Cortexica, a provider of image recognition technology, has just announced that they have made an important step toward a way to be able to take a picture of anything, and then apply that image to mobile commerce purposes so that it can be instantly purchased online.

Mobile websites are more popular than mobile apps when it comes to actual business & financial transaction level in UK. While 51% complete purchase via mobile websites on monthly or more frequent basis compare to 40% via mobile app.

EBay was the first blockbuster e-commerce success story but eBay Inc.'s CEO is talking up the allure of bricks-and-mortar stores. The CEO may have good reason to pull for the survival of stores, and for the retail chains that operate them. For those retail chains and eBay are being pushed into an unexpected alliance against their common enemy-today's blinding e-commerce star, Amazon.com Inc.

An e-commerce giant in China is planning a stronger ecosystem, including a dedicated sales channel on its popular online shopping portal and financial incentives to attract more industry backing.