commerce

Tablet owners are quite comfortable buying goods and services through their devices, a trend that's fueling the growth in mobile shopping, says mobile media firm JiWire.

As tablet ownership has doubled over the past year, a new study from JiWire found that 82 percent of tablet users are OK buying items through their mobile devices (either tablets or smartphones), compared with 76 percent of smartphone users.

Further, tablet owners aren't afraid to spend big bucks. A full 67 percent of the tablet users are willing to spend $50 or more on a purchase, compared with just 57 percent … Read more

We are in the middle of the holiday buying season right now, between the first rush of gift-buying that happened on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the "Oh, crap, I need to start buying presents!" feeling that happens in about a week.

This is the most important month for the consumer tech economy, but this December will be different from all the ones that came before it.

Why? Mobile devices, online shopping, social networking, improved analytics, changing tax laws, and changing behaviors among both buyers and sellers, among other reasons. Today we are talking about how the gadget economy is evolving.

My guests are: Claire Cain Miller, a reporter at The New York Times who's been writing about this topic, and a returning guest to the Roundtable; and Mike Fridgen, CEO of one of my favorite tech startups, Decide.com. This company runs a service that can tell you if the price of a tech item you're looking at is good today and if it will be going up or down in the near future.

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There is no more influential business lobby group in the world than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which boasts that its "core purpose is to fight for free enterprise" and "individual freedom."

Which is why the Chamber's unflagging--even unyielding--support of a controversial copyright bill loathed by Silicon Valley might come as something of a surprise. Not only do critics view the Stop Online Piracy Act as antithetical to the individual freedom the Chamber applauds, but the technology industry has contributed more to economic growth and free enterprise in the last decade than Hollywood has. … Read more

Cyber Monday officially rules the U.S. online-shopping season, racking up $1.25 billion in sales yesterday--a 22 percent increase over the previous year, according to ComScore data.

Monday's spending reflected both an 11 percent increase in the number of people shopping online and a significant jump in how much they spent. More than 10 million people bought something online yesterday, the online-marketing research firm said. Those shoppers made an average of 1.9 purchases apiece, in total worth an average of nearly $125--a 9 percent increase over per capita spending on Cyber Monday 2010.

The ComScore data differs … Read more

Apple's iPhone and iPad helped make mobile devices a key driver of Thanksgiving and Black Friday e-commerce this year, according to a report from IBM Coremetrics.

Online Thanksgiving shopping grew by 39.3 percent year over year, creating momentum that continued into Black Friday, where online sales grew by 24.3 percent compared with the same period last year, said the report (PDF).

And Black Friday witnessed the arrival of the mobile deal seeker, who embraced his or her mobile device as a research tool for in-store and online bargains. Mobile traffic came close to tripling year over year, … Read more

We're in the middle of a revolution in consumer commerce. The connected consumer (all of us) no longer relies on catalogs for prices or salespeople in stores for advice. Now we use our social networks to get advice from friends and friends of friends, and we have access to scanners and price comparison engines on our smartphones that are turning retail stores into showrooms, not necessarily places you go to buy.

There's a smart guy who's been tracking these trends for years, and he's my guest today. Brian Solis is author of The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution.

Brian was on the Roundtable about a year and a half ago discussing social media. Currently, Brian is principal at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm.

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Good things come in small packages, and that just might be the case with Givvy; a two-man, self-funded startup. Today they are launching a Facebook-based gift-giving network that lets people on the social network discover and list gifts based on their friends' recommendations.

CTO Larry Rubin handles development and UI design while CEO Claudio Miranda handles everything else: graphic design, marketing, accounting, merchandising, legal, and PR. Miranda was the co-founder and CMO of Organic Bouquet, an online retailer of eco-friendly flowers & gifts. Rubin recently built Socializr.com with Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams.

Rubin and Miranda hope to tap … Read more

American Express plans to dabble in mobile payments and other forms of digital commerce at an arm's length, preferring to throw cash at startups rather than launch its own major initiatives.

The company said today that it will invest $100 million in startups that are designed to address mobile and online payments, security, reward and loyalty programs, and other forms of digital commerce.

This represents American Express's primary stab at the booming digital-commerce business, a potentially lucrative area that has a large number of players all vying for position. American Express's low-key approach stands in contrast to … Read more

As the holiday shopping season rears its (insert your adjective of choice here) head, a just-released study from IBM shows that mobile devices are continuing their push toward making it a post-PC world.

According to the latest IBM Coremetrics Benchmark numbers, traffic to retailer Web sites from mobile devices will more than double this November, with 15 percent of people who log on to such sites doing so with a mobile gadget.

October numbers from IBM show that year over year the amount of people who used a mobile gadget to touch down on a retailer's site jumped from 4.2 percent to 11 percent. In the same period, total mobile sales shot up to 9.6 percent from last year's 3.4 percent

iPad users will no doubt be welcomed by online retailers in the next couple of months: IBM says site visitors on that device will make more actual purchases than visitors using other mobile gizmos. That prediction is based on the fact that conversion rates for last month were 6.8 percent on the iPad versus 3.6 percent on other mobile gadgets.… Read more