Following a significant impact on holiday shopping, it appears mobile also played a role in purchases leading up to Valentine's Day. Overall online shopping grew 8% during the week before Valentine's Day compared to last year and mobile accounted for more than a third (37%) of online traffic, based on data from IBM's Digital Analytics Benchmark released today.

The integration of the physical and mobile shopping world continues. At the 11th annual Digital Signage Expo (DSE) in Las Vegas this week, the traditional word of in-store screen signage (and outside signage, for that matter) implicitly acknowledged the proliferation of smartphones moving past those screens.

One stat about mobile shopping caught my eye earlier this week. The report about digital consumer behaviors from Nielsen showed that consumers today are more connected than ever and that the majority (65%) have smartphones, the same percentage that comScore found in its latest tally.

In the world of mobile payments, there's changing behavior and there's creating it. And based on some new numbers out of a payments company headquartered in China, there may be bigger numbers in creating it -- at least in some cases. Alibaba reports that its Alipay division is now the world's largest mobile payments processor, passing PayPal and Square combined.

The modification in how consumers use mobile phones for commerce continues. Amazon just merged its image recognition technology called Flow into its main mobile app, allowing consumers to hold their iPhone in front of a product and get that product added to their shopping cart for an easy purchase.

With the new year well underway, more retail research studies are coming out pointing to the enormous opportunity in mobile commerce. The good news for merchants is that store sales are projected to increase a bit (4%) this year, according to the national Retail Federation, which shows online sales increasing up to 12%.

"Get that thing away from my register. I don't want any technology near my terminals. That could be hacking device." A bit startled, I put the contactless payment device back in my pocket and paid in cash. For some time, I've experimented with various mobile payment options including Google Wallet, Square, Isis and LevelUp, among others.

Winter weather doesn't appear to be holding shoppers back. Tracking many millions of pings of smartphones at shopping malls and stores, analytics firm Euclid determined that shopping visits last month to be a bit higher (1.4%) than a year before with shoppers spending more time in stores.

The march to more smartphones continues, paving the way for mobile commerce. The first part of mobile commerce growth is for more people to get smartphones, which is now happening in a big way. The latest data from comScore just out shows that smartphone penetration has reached a significant majority, with 156 million people in the U.S. now owning a smartphone, most (65%) of the mobile market.

For mobile payments aficionados, there's some good news and some bad news. Mobile payments are seriously on the rise, at least from a percentage standpoint, according to a new study.