Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com 
Just like a camera, the best store is the one you have with you. And most of us carry our smartphones with us everywhere we go and buy things all day long.
In a forthcoming consumer study, Nielsen reports that 29 percent of smartphone owners are “mobile shoppers.” This figure is even with a narrowly defined set of “shopping-related activities.” For instance, Nielsen doesn’t include “used a map to find directions to a store or restaurant,” “purchased books, magazines, or applications,” “taking photos of items purchased or desired,” or “sharing reactions to or reviews of a purchase online.” Together, I’d bet that handful of shopping-related activities alone would tip the mobile shoppers figure over 50 percent, at least.
Smartphones aren’t about online commerce so much as digital guidance on the ground. The most popular shopping uses for smartphones are product research, usually in-store. In Q3 2011, 38 percent of mobile shoppers in Nielsen’s survey compared prices online while shopping in a store; 38 percent also browsed products through websites or apps, and 32 percent read online reviews of products.
Mobile shoppers are also making use of more than just the web browser. A full 22 percent are using phones to scan barcodes for prices or product details. Overall, getting information through our phones is much more popular than actually using them to make a purchase.
But this is beginning to change, as a new generation of applications make genuine mobile shopping easier. Twenty-two percent of mobile shoppers actually buy retail products on their phones, through apps or on the web. And although only nine percent have used phones as digital wallets to buy products at point of sale, Nielsen’s researchers note that “the desire to do so is apparent – 71 percent of app downloaders would be interested in an app that allows them to use their phone as a credit card,” with iPhone users leading the way.
Now juxtapose this with another Nielsen study, also released this week, of smartphone penetration by age and income:
The younger you are and the more money you have, the more likely you are to own a smartphone. Young people with disposable income are committed to a mobile, connected lifestyle, comfortable using and downloading apps, clearly comfortable sharing personal information with those apps, and overwhelmingly willing in principle to explore using their phones as digital wallets — yet, they’re not actually doing it. Why not?
Here’s my theory. Even though plenty of companies are working to bring smartphone payments to customers and retailers, none of them have been able to command enough attention from either retailers or users to become a genuine wide-ranging platform. And when it comes to payments, companies really need three things: trust, convenience and ubiquity.
Think about credit cards. It wasn’t so long ago that at least in most contexts, credit cards weren’t very convenient to use. Plenty of retailers still don’t accept them, or illegally insist on minimum purchases, or only support a few major players. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an American Express card rejected by a restaurant whose checks were presented in a leather case with the “American Express” logo emblazoned on the front.)
We commit ourselves to credit cards, smartphones, wireless carriers, social networks and other applications because they’re convenient, they’re broadly useful, and we trust the companies behind them. Once we commit, we’re captured.
There is a huge opportunity for any company who can capture the mobile payments platform for the next generation. I don’t know if that’s Google, Square, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Microsoft or some combination of those companies and someone not yet on the scene. But I do know we’re growing more and more accustomed to seeing our smartphones not just as communication and reading devices, but as multipurpose buying machines.
With those huge sums and broad range of uses at stake, mobile commerce’s potential can’t exceed its actualization by this much for so long. Something will break through — and I think it will happen soon.
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