When it comes to mobile commerce, small businesses sometimes can benefit from bigger back-end technologies. I recently caught up with the person who leveraged location to show where potential customers could find their products, all in very limited supply. California tequila-maker Tres Agaves Products ran a test in three states to see if they could link mobile consumers to one of their limited-distribution products. Like many small businesses, Tres Agaves wasn't advanced along the mobile commerce chain, especially given that the company is only a few years old.

Mobile apps relating to loyalty programs may give retailers an edge over showrooming. Deep inside a new study analyzing how brands connect and build loyalty with their customers is an interesting piece of mobile commerce insight. The 2013 Maritz Loyalty Report just out comprised a survey of 6,000 consumers involving loyalty programs at retail, grocery, credit cards, co-brands, travel and hospitality and found the average member is in seven programs. While 9 out of 10 consumers want to receive communications from their loyalty programs, it was the mobile attitude data that caught my eye.

There obviously are multiple issues around the mobile payments, many dealing with consumer adoption. Last night, I got to participate in a one-hour Twitter chat dealing with some of the specifics relating to opportunities and impediments around forward movement. In on the chat were John Tuders, Senior Vice President, Product & Payments Innovation Executive at Bank of America, and Ken Moy, Group Senior Vice President of Emerging Payments at MasterCard Worldwide, the two entities that organized the chat, moderated by Todd Wasserman, Mashable's business editor.

Though we wrote about the 10% world of mobile commerce yesterday, it doesn't mean commerce isn't growing in some substantial ways. A new report out today indicates that some retailers are seeing significant year-over-year growth, to the tune of an 85% increase in orders via smartphones. The research is based on 76 million Web visits, 511 million page views and 1.2 million orders totaling $163 million. The index was organized by m-commerce platform provider Branding Brand over a group of 18 major retailers whose commerce sites they developed specifically for mobile commerce.

Samsung's hot, new Galaxy S4 has a feature that in many ways mirrors the mobile commerce marketplace. It's called Easy Mode and when you switch the phone to it, the device provides large buttons to only those features that might be most useful, such as camera, phone, internet, contacts, phone and calendar. While there are 7 billion mobile phones globally, most of the mobile commerce marketplace seems to be operating in Easy Mode.

The use of NFC for mobile payments is a bit of a chicken and egg battle. Companies involved in mobile payments want to use NFC-enabled phones but most people don't yet have them. However, the global volume of NFC-enabled smartphones will more than double this year, according to Strategy Analytics, and this without Apple yet being on board. Next year, the number of NFC-enabled devices will pass 500 million, according to ABI Research. Bottom line is there will be a lot of phones with the technology in the foreseeable future.

Augmented Reality (AR) may have found a place to happen. When AR was first seen and used a few years ago, it was generally showcased by data overlays over objects or places seen through the phone's camera. The general ideas was that you could aim a phone camera at a building and see all the associated information about the building on the screen in front of the image, essentially augmenting the reality of the building you were looking at. While fun to do the first time or two, the idea didn't catch on at any kind of scale.

Those mobile coupons keep coming, mainly because they work. Going through a new study by BI Intelligence confirms what various other research has been finding, that mobile coupons are small, but effective and growing. The study points out that the number of mobile coupons is expected to increase to 53 million a year by next year. More significantly is the redemption rate of 10% compared to the 1% redemption rate of traditional coupons. It's no secret that mobile coupons drive traffic to stores and that shoppers are attracted to and enticed by deals.

Inch by inch, various aspects of mobile payments are moving forward. Just over the last few days, a series of small, individual announcements have been made by different mobile payment entities. While none of these are earth shattering by themselves, it strikes me that taken together they provide an indicator of the day-by-day progress being made in the general area.

The small business market is looking more like the mobile consumer marketplace every day. The latest survey results from an AT&T small business study highlighted some interesting mobile stats about small business. It strikes me that many of these same characteristics apply to typical mobile consumers, a large number of whom use Wi-Fi, 4G speeds and apps to save time, among other reasons.