Mobile hotel booking can involve a lot of timing. Various studies have shown that many people what until the last minute to book a hotel room, mainly because they can. Hotel booking apps have come a long way and more and more travelers are finding and using them. But elements in addition to time can play a role when interacting with hotels.

Thanks to mobile, people no longer go shopping; they always are shopping. Website visits per shopper in the first quarter were up 9%, largely because of cross-device shopping, based on the latest tracking index. Smartphones now account for 35% of all traffic and 18% of orders, according to the quarterly Demandware shopping index.

The consumer choice of using a retailer's app or website to shop remains unsettled. Some major retailers have found that their customers prefer using their mobile website over their app for commerce, no matter how good the app is. It turns out that of those who have purchased on a mobile device, more than a third (38%) prefer the mobile website when shopping on a smartphone followed by 36% who prefer the full website, based on a recent study.

While using a phone to shop has become rather commonplace, using a phone to buy is still a relatively small deal. The influence of mobile on sales and the actual sales via mobile are a universe apart. A new study now takes a look at that gap and examines the reasons for it.

Targeting the mobile shopper and delivering relevant messaging get better each year. Sometimes it can take more than a year to fine-tune how precise that targeting can get and how to make the messages most relevant to that person. For a few years now, LocalResponse tracked all public posts and check-ins from platforms including Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram. The company then registered the activity, whether it was from a location-based service or social network where people were publicly posting either the check-in or the sentiment itself.

In and around mobile commerce, some things stay the same but things around those things tend to evolve and expand. Three recent but totally unrelated mobile program modifications caught my eye over the last few days. First, ShopSavvy, one of my favorite apps for in-store price checking since its launch several years ago, evolved its app to cater to shoppers. The app started aggregating all sales from more than 500,000 retailers and created more than 3,000 navigational product categories.

While mobile shopping is big, shopping in a store remains a lot bigger. Study after study shows that the overwhelming number of consumers prefers shopping in a store over all other methods. One of the challenges facing retailers is equipping sales associates to deal with in-store shoppers.

Retailers have been continually challenged with how to better engage with mobile shoppers. There was the showrooming fear, where merchants expected to see their stores become mere product display areas for customers who would then simply buy online. Over time it turned out that the overwhelming majority of shoppers still preferred to make their purchases in a physical store. As the number of app downloads exploded along with the proliferation of highly evolved mobile technology, retailers poured resource into app development.

Any regular reader here knows we look at the entire world of mobile commerce, both technologically and geographically. Since we continually see a lot of research from a wide range of sources, some better than others, we try to discern what matters most at any given moment. There's been a recent wave of mobile commerce indicators from various parts of the world I've been noticing as of late, pointing to a continuing maturing of mobile markets all around the world. Some examples:

It's quite easy to get caught up in the technology around mobile commerce. We're faced with a daily barrage of research studies and announcements regarding NFC, QR codes, RFID radio tags, beacons and the like. Many of the mobile technology innovations are targeted at mobile payments, so that consumers can use their mobile device to pay in one way or another. A reality check of sorts came out of the Deutsche Bank Global Financial Services Conference this week.