This weeks sign of the times has to be the news that eBay saw their sales via mobile devices rise from $600mm to over $2b in 2010. The apps, which are available for the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 operating systems, have been downloaded by over 30 million people in more than 190 countries. Interestingly, the UK has been the fastest Eurpoean adopter of eBay’s mobile app, and combined with Germany they “generated nearly one third of all eBay’s mobile sales in 2010“. According to eBay, every minute there are 94 bids made for various products and 13 items of clothing/shoes/accessories are purchased. This really highlights the growing trend for consumers to do their shopping online and should resonate loud and clear with traditional, brick and mortar retailers. 
The message being sent by the market is very clear – develop an online/mobile presence so that our shopping experiences are as fast and painless as possible, or we’ll buy from someone else who can. We’re already seeing the response to this trend from macro retailers like Target, Safeway and BestBuy with their expanding presences on Facebook, mobile applications, and location based services like Shopkick and Foursquare. For the mid-size and smaller retailers who are losing the tech-race, the time is now to start implementing solutions like the Accelitec software suite if they hope to close this growing gap and ultimately start winning back a percentage of these sales lost to online retailers.
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