Study: Apple's iPhone, iPad account for 90 percent of mobile purchases
If people are buying through mobile online retail site, they're most likely doing so on Apple devices, according to a new report this week from retail analysis firm RichRelevance. iPads and iPhones accounted …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends a story the corpus has been tracking all fall: in October, AppleInsider measured the iPad at 97% of tablet web traffic, and RichRelevance's new data shows that browsing dominance converts into buying power — iPhones and iPads account for 90% of purchases made through mobile retail sites.
The finding lands against a more mixed backdrop for Apple hardware itself: Kantar Worldpanel ComTech reported this week that weak European economies and cheaper rival smartphones are dragging on iPhone sales across Europe, while ComScore separately found Apple's online traffic exceeding Walmart's in November — so the device mix is softening in some markets even as its share of mobile commerce concentrates.
First-order effects
- Retailers and e-commerce teams reading RichRelevance's numbers have a direct mandate to optimize checkout flows for iOS first, since nine in ten mobile dollars run through Apple devices.
- Android's large installed base is exposed as low-conversion for retail transactions, forcing developers who treated porting as a checkbox to weigh whether Android commerce apps justify their cost.
Second-order effects
- Mobile advertising and retail-analytics vendors will price and target iOS traffic at a premium, shifting ad budgets toward Apple audiences and squeezing publishers whose readership skews Android.
- Rivals like Google face pressure to close the conversion gap — not just drive traffic — or cede the mobile commerce layer to a single-vendor ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile commerce consolidates around whoever owns the high-converting device, giving Apple structural leverage over retail pricing, promotions, and placement much as it already holds over app distribution through iTunes.
- The Kantar Europe data suggests the concentration is not guaranteed everywhere: price-sensitive markets could fragment mobile commerce along regional lines if cheaper Android devices keep gaining ground.
The trend: Mobile commerce is being measured less by traffic share and more by purchase conversion, where Apple's device lead compounds into control of the retail transaction layer.