Consumer use of smartphones and tablets incorporates a range of different activities and behaviours, including search, email, social and the mobile web. And a new survey has found that businesses are responding to this by developing their capabilities over a range of mobile channels. When asked which mobile channels they plan on using during the next 12 months just over half (55%) said apps, followed by mobile advertising (51%), optimised emails (50%) and tablet-specific sites (50%). Mobile search and commerce were also cited by precisely half (50%) of client-side respondents

The growth in the ownership and usage of smartphones and tablets in the UK has helped to boost the number of purchases made online in recent months. But now, retailer John Lewis has predicted that m-commerce visitors will generate the majority of traffic for the first time on December 25th 2013. On Christmas Day each year, millions of Brits use the web to make purchases, because of course most high street outlets are closed and people usually have a lot of gift certificates and festive cash to spend. During this day in 2012, John Lewis reports that close to half …

Vans recently saw a 75 percent engagement rate by targeting mall shoppers with a mobile offer during the key back-to-school shopping period. The bonus bucks promotion offered users an extra $20 extra in-store when they made a $50 purchase and was delivered online and inside Vans stores nationwide. However, at major malls in Boston and Los Angeles, shoppers with a mobile phone received a prompt on their screens to opt-in to receive the offer.

While sophisticated retailers are leveraging mobile ads on Facebook to drive in-store traffic or deep link mobile application ads to enable purchases from within an app, on the whole the retail sector lags behind other marketers in targeting the social network's large mobile user base. Retailers are allocating less than 20 percent of their Facebook budgets to mobile compared to the average of around 40 percent, according to recent data from Nanigans. Those retailers who are doing a good job are moving beyond driving app downloads from Facebook to run hyperlocal ads that drive in-store traffic or deep-linking mobile app …

HMV has gone through some tough times in recent years, with well publicised financial issues resulting from its stagnation on the high street. But it has managed to come back from the brink this year and is now pushing into the m-commerce market with a new digital download service available for iOS and Android smartphones. HMV originally rose to prominence by selling music in physical formats and now it is hoping that by offering digital tracks via safe shopping online, it will be in a good position to thrive in the future. British consumers are using their mobile handsets to …

The mobile retail audience in Europe has seen some pretty tremendous growth over the past year, at least in the five biggest markets across the continent. In the three months ending in August of this year, the European mobile retail audience was 31 million, an increase of over 43% from the same period the year before, according to data from comScore, which was released on Monday. That accounts for over 20% of the entire smartphone audience, aged 13 and older, in the so-called EU5, which includes France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. When broken down by country, obviously …

Over half over UK consumers use their mobile when shopping, and almost a quarter (22 per cent) make purchases through their phones, research from VoucherCodes.co.uk has found. The international research, carried out by Ipsos Public Affairs, discovered that UK is the European capital of m-commerce, with ten per cent of those surveyed in the UK saying that their smartphone is their main method of shopping. In France, just four per cent claim to have ever made purchase through a mobile device, whereas Germany and the Netherlands boast just 14 and eight per cent respectively.

Online marketplace Snapdeal said that 30 per cent of the orders on its portal are being placed using mobile phones, a trend which has grown about 10 times in the past 12 months. The e-commerce site recently conducted a study on the m-commerce (mobile based transactions) trends being observed on its platform. The insights are based on the sales and traffic seen on Snapdeal in the last 6 months. Snapdeal witnesses about 35-40 million average visits every month. Its mobile commerce site witnesses about 12 million average visits per month. "Thirty per cent of all orders on Snapdeal are now …

Time Inc.'s All You is upping its mobile investments to give consumers more ways to shop from the lifestyle magazine's content. The value-geared magazine is expanding on a partnership with Shopadvisor earlier this year to roll out commerce to its static print pages in addition to existing tablet shopping features. In addition to driving instant sales, All You's mobile shopping also lets readers waitlist items that can be bought later when the price drops.

A top executive from Isis--the mobile payments joint venture from AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile US --told the audience here at the MobileCon 2013 trade show that he believes mobile commerce could one day replace credit cards, but it will take a number of years for that transition to occur. Michael Abbott, CEO of Isis, said that the U.S. payment industry is worth $4 trillion today, mostly through credit cards. "It took 40 years to move it from cash to check. It will move but it will take a number of years."