If retailers needed any additional evidence to highlight the growing importance of offering consumers mobile commerce sites, a new report from comScore suggests more Americans are leveraging their mobile devices to visit online retailers.

Of the approximately 100 million U.S. adults who own a smartphone, 44 million of them visited Amazon.com's mobile retail website in March. Meanwhile, 27.2 million headed to eBay's mcommerce website using either mobile web browsers or downloaded applications.

However, mobile apps and websites are not even, and retailers may want to focus on the former before developing the latter.

"Analysis of the share of time spent across apps and browsers revealed that even though these access methods had similar audience sizes, apps drove the lion’s share of engagement, representing four in every five mobile media minutes," the report added. "Analysis of the top properties also revealed widely varying degrees of time spent between app and browser access methods."

Mobile apps carry the additional benefit of always being present on consumers' smartphones once they are downloaded, providing a quick shortcut to a retailer's product page.

This entry was posted by Retail Pro on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 7:47 am .