Amazon is currently the leading online retailer, having a major share of the online market. With the inception of smartphone devices, it had been hoped that we may witness a shift in the market in that people may move from in-site purchases to retailer apps or to alternate retailers rather than the conventional ones. As it turns out, both these assertions seem to be wrong. According to a report form Nielson, Amazon is the most popular retail website used by smartphone users.
Nielson gathered the data for this report from 5,000 US smartphone users who agreed to be a part of the research. Another significant finding in the report is that surprisingly, the number of users who prefer visiting the mobile version of an online store is still larger compared to the users who use mobile retail apps for their purchases.
The difference is pretty small but it goes on to show that retailer apps haven’t yet gained enough traction to replace in-site purchasing. Another possible reason for the lack of popularity of retails apps could be that some retailers haven’t still offered a retail app for all major smartphone platforms or that the users perhaps feel more comfortable using the mobile version of the site rather than the app.
According to the results gathered, about 60% of the smartphone mobile retail traffic goes to traditional online retailers such as Best Buy, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target. But Amazon is right at the top of the market. This is probably because Amazon has strived aggressively to grab hold of the smartphone market by introducing an app at a fairly early time. And now that it has shipped millions of Kindle Fire units, that too may have contributed to bolstering the popularity of the website.
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