The magic of mobile payments: Nine mind-blowing statistics.

Paying from anywhere has become one of the hottest consumer trends to sweep the business world in decades. The popularity of mobile payments can be traced to the security and convenience that make them a win-win for merchants and shoppers alike.

What are mobile payments?

When consumers use their smartphones or tablets to purchase products and services, the transactions are known as mobile payments. With every passing year, ecommerce gobbles up a larger share of consumers’ buying preferences.

Statistics about internet use.

For ecommerce to work properly, buyers must have online access. While you might think that this would be a problem for much of the world, statistics say the opposite.

1. As of 2019, 56 percent of the world’s population had internet access. With every day that passes, an additional one million individuals come online. That’s a lot of consumers.

2. People spend an average of six hours and 42 minutes online each day, with more than 3.5 hours of that time on their smartphones. Now that more and more businesses have ecommerce websites available to anyone, at any time, from anywhere, the opportunities for retail success have skyrocketed.

3. You might be under the impression that the vast majority of people use laptops or desktop PCs to browse the internet. However, a full 49 percent of website traffic is now made up of mobile phone users. This underscores the need for any business owner who has not already done so to make their site mobile-friendly.

Statistics about shopper behavior.

Let’s take a deeper dive into what the numbers say about how consumers act when it comes to sites that accept mobile payments.

4. Mobile payers tend to browse for products and then act on their choices within one hour. Compare that to desktop users, 70 percent of whom take a month to come to a decision after a similar visit.

5. A full 79 percent of all adult Americans have bought at least one item online in their lifetime, with more than half of those individuals having purchased something using their smartphone.

6. Back in 2018, mobile transactions made up almost 40 percent of all the ecommerce sales in the U.S. Experts estimate that this number will rise to more than 50 percent of total sales by 2022.

7. The numbers are even more dramatic for global mobile payments. In 2016, global mobile sales had already accounted for over 52 percent of all ecommerce transactions.

8. Mobile phones do much more than facilitate payments. 61 percent of American consumers also use them while shopping in-store to compare prices and search for bargains.

9. Globally speaking, experts project that mobile payments will soon be involved in more than half of the ecommerce purchases made.

If you haven’t yet made mobile payments part of your plan to sell products to your customers, let cold, hard numbers be your guide. Failing to adopt this trend will ultimately leave you and your store behind, forced to watch as your competitors cash in on the ever-expanding mobile payments marketplace.