Growth, Adoption, and Use of Mobile E-Commerce

As of May 2013, 56 percent of American adults had a smartphone, and most of them used it to access the Internet. One-third of smartphone users report that their phone is the primary way they go online. Just as the Internet changed retailing in the late 1990s, many argue that the transition to mobile, sometimes referred to as “Web 3.0,” will have a similarly disruptive effect (Brynjolfsson et al. 2013). In this paper, we aim to document some early effects of how mobile devices might change Internet and retail commerce. We present three main findings based on an analysis of eBay’s mobile shopping application and core Internet platform. First, and not surprisingly, the early adopters of mobile e-commerce applications appear