Screen Pages has released an updated study on how e-commerce websites are used on mobile devices. The study shows that mobile devices now account for 20.8% of all traffic, more than doubling from 10.3% in the past 9 months.
Screen Pages is an e-commerce agency which designs and builds retail websites for niche retail brands. The online shops analysed in the study are all running on the Magento e-commerce platform. Screen Pages used Google Analytics for analysis and studied over 0.5m visitors in June 2012. The websites offer premium or quality lifestyle goods with an average order value of just under £100. Figures are all based on traffic to websites which have not been optimised for mobile devices.

IMRG reported this week that mobile usage for June 2012 was up 356% from the previous year.

Key findings
- 20.8% visits are mobile from mobile devices (although for one third of the sample, this figure approached 25%). Shops with a more conservative demographic are at the lower end of the range.
- 84.5% of all mobile visits are from Apple devices
- iPad usage has increased to 54.9% from 46.4%, whilst the share of shoppers using iPhones has decreased from 35.5% to 29.6%
- iPad shoppers buy more: average conversion rates on iPads are 22.5% higher, visitors converting at 3% against 2.8% for the websites overall.
- iPhones are a problem: they convert at nearly one third of the website average at 1%.
Commentary

Mobile usage is growing exponentially – more than doubling in the last nine months. At one fifth of all online shoppers, retailers cannot ignore mobile behaviours and shopping demands, evaluating its role in marketing and fulfilment.
Retailers can however take some comfort that the increasingly more popular device (iPad) is already producing greater sales with no special investment: consumers are shopping more from iPads and are more likely to buy with iPads and today’s websites – without optimisation – perform well.
Investment is required however to meet the needs of iPhone shoppers. Granted that the shopping experience on the smaller screen device may never yield the same commercial value as an iPad or PC, but there is a clear economic case for optimisation. Given the ease of optimising for smaller screens on modern e-commerce platforms such as Magento, the modest investment could be repaid massively with increased sales. It is already clear that 30-40% of all marketing emails are opened on mobiles, a website’s best converting traffic would easily generate further sales.