Some say shopping on your smartphone or tablet is still in its infancy stage. While this may be true to a certain degree, however, several new holiday shopping reports show that mobile commerce is growing up pretty fast.

In the article, “Mobile commerce played an integral part of the 2011 holiday season,” online retailers capitalized on the smartphone and tablet phenomenon by boosting their m-commerce promotions during the past holiday season. As a result, a company spokesperson at Gilt Groupe, a US-based shopping website, said mobile-only promotions contributed to 20% of all sales during November and December, with mobile traffic and sales increasing well over 100% in December 2011 compared to December 2010.

“Mobile continues to play a large role in driving Gilt’s business. And we continue to utilize mobile as a channel to reach both existing and new customers wherever they are.”

North America electronics retailer, Crutchfield Corporation, also saw triple-digit increases in mobile traffic and sales, a trend the Crutchfield’s director of e-commerce, Todd Cabell, believes will continue to climb in the new year.

“Mobile was certainly a bright spot this holiday season. It’s clear more and more customers are becoming comfortable using their mobile devices to research and purchase a wide variety of products. We anticipate continued growth in both the smartphone and tablet channels during 2012.”

As more consumers trust their mobile devices to purchase goods over the Internet, online merchants recognize the importance of including mobile in their cross-channel marketing efforts. At iovation, we see the mobile channel not only as an emerging sales channel, but a thriving one, for e-commerce. This is why our ReputationManager 360 fraud prevention tool recognizes, in real-time, all Internet-connected devices by type, including PCs, smartphones and tablets, that access retail websites.

By better understanding the devices connecting to their site, retail fraud managers can immediately accept, deny or pull for further review all transactions coming through their cross-channel sales mix. For retailer’s creating mobile-exclusive promotions that target smartphone and tablet users, this level of fraud protection is essential to the customer experience, profitability, and a merchant’s overall brand reputation.

If you are interested in learning more about how iovation protect online retail sites from fraudsters attempting all types of criminal or abusive behavior, we will be at the upcoming NRF Retail’s Big Show, January 16-18 in New York City.

We’d love it if you stopped by our booth #2820 to chat about any fraud issues your business is experiencing or anticipating, and to pick up your Virtual Crime Fighter t-shirt. By integrating iovation’s device reputation service on your account creation or checkout page, for example, we can help you stop cyber criminals—all without collecting any personally identifiable information (PII)—whether they are using a computer, tablet or mobile phone to access your site.

And while at the NRF Retail’s Big Show, one session that looks very interesting is “Emerging Technologies: Driving Businesses for Retailers, While Minimizing Risks from Fraudsters” at 2:00 pm on Tuesday.  The session is moderated by Evan Schuman, Editor of StorefrontBacktalk.com with speakers Joseph LaRocca, Sr. Asset Protection Advisor of the NRF and Bill Titus, Vice President of Loss Prevention at Sears Holding Corporation.  (See page 37 of the Show Guide).

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2012 at 9:56 am and is filed under Credit Card Fraud, Identity Theft, Online Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.