• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, August 9, 2013

The latest Groupon sales report is another reminder that deals are becoming more, well, mobile.

In addition to hitting quarterly revenue of more than $600 million, the company noted that close to half its transactions in North America are now done on mobile devices. This is up from fewer than a third just a year ago.

This is where focusing on showrooming rather misses the point. People are not only going to stores to check out products before buying online. They are continually shopping.

More people are buying on-the-fly because they can.

And this is where companies like Groupon, Rue La La and Gilt come in.

They cater to the mobile shopper, which is evolving to be all shoppers. eBay figured this out long ago and has prospered from it.

Merchants will be pressed to deal with these new shopping behaviors, since more than half (51%) of time spent on retail websites is now taking place on mobile devices, according to a new study by comScore conducted for Millennial Media.

Shoppers are becoming less and less tied to stationary PCs, freeing them to shop all the time wherever they are.

The comScore study also showed that consumers are using their mobile devices in stores for various activities, such as scanning product barcodes (58%), researching products (57%) and checking product availability (47%).

If a Groupon or other deal happens to come along while a consumer is doing any of that in a store, there’s nothing to stop that consumer from tapping into the deal at the moment.

At that moment of purchase decision, the retailer is not necessarily competing with a direct competitor like another retailer, but rather an unseen and unrelated deal.

The shopper may decide to divert their planned in-store spending to the mobile deal at the moment.

This is why the move to mobile bodes well for companies offering deals.

With mobile, a good deal doesn’t care who has it. Or when.