Facebook m-commerce transactions on the rise

By

Kate Dingwall

Published
Jan 25, 2017

According to a new study by Facebook and Kantar, mobile transactions are the future for Facebook. The social media website is experiencing a huge shift to mobile at the moment, charting more mobile transactions over laptop/desktop in the past holiday season. 

This past holiday season running from November 1st to December 31st, 51% of Facebook transactions were conducted on a mobile device, showing a huge jump from the 2015 holiday season, where just 41% of transactions were completed via mobile.

Facebook noted that one-third of customers regularly look to social media sites like Facebook and Instagram to find new products. One-fifth of customers who made a purchase in the three months prior to August 2016 purchased products because of what they saw on Facebook. Customers even seem to prefer viewing ads on mobile, born out by the study's findings about how much quicker ad absorption was on mobile devices. Users who saw ads on mobile devices purchased the advertised product 13% faster than consumers who saw the ad on a desktop computer.

That doesn’t mean computer-based purchases aren’t happening – between Q1 of 2014 and Q1 of 2016, desktop purchases grew 21%. But over the same period, m-commerce grew an impressive 114%.This is in part due to all the payment options offered by mobile retailers. Thanks to apps like Square, retailers can cash out customers by swiping their credit or debit cards right on their cell phones. M-commerce innovations, like photographing credit cards to receive payment (utilized by Uber), are expanding every day, opening more and more doors towards greater m-commerce options.