Orbitz.com is making a significant play for a bigger role in its customers' journeys beyond simply booking a flight or hotel, with mobile loyalty playing a crucial role in bringing this vision to fruition. The new Orbitz Rewards program enables users to earn rewards at a higher rate for hotel bookings made from its mobile apps than booking through other channels. It is fully integrated with the Google Wallet loyalty feature for both Android and iOS and features unique functionality such as the ability to view hotels in search results with member's rewards already applied.

QVC, which expects to do more than $1 billion in global mobile sales in 2013, is counting on mobile commerce as a big driver of web sales in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., m-commerce makes up about 30% of e-commerce sales for QVC compared with 45% in Japan, 44% in the United Kingdom, 19% in Italy and 13% in Germany. While not disclosing actual sales and using a June-through-June comparison time frame, Italy was QVC's fastest growing m-commerce market at an annual growth rate of 331%. Italy was followed by Germany at 294%, the United Kingdom at 133%, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Although the holiday shopping season has become synonymous with crowded malls and waiting in tremendous lineups once the perfect items have been found, mobile commerce is predicted to begin a sizeable change in this tradition, this year. Moreover, shoppers will also be using mobile commerce to be able to hunt for the products that they want and find the best prices so that they can buy them in store, reducing the amount of time that they will actually spend going from one brick and mortar store, so that they can beeline to exactly what they want. Not only will they …

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."

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.

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 …