Dive Brief:

• More than 45% of consumers who shop online complete their purchases via mobile smartphone, compared to just under 34% who use computers, thereby showing how big a role mobile devices have come to play in shopping and payments, according to PYMNTS.com's new Remote Payments study.

• Also, 63.8% of consumers who paid for purchases remotely with their mobile devices discovered the products while browsing online. Additionally, 12.5% of surveyed consumers who paid for their latest purchase in a brick-and-mortar store discovered those products while browsing online with their mobile phones, the report stated.

• Approximately 22% of 4,900 consumers surveyed admitted to using mobile devices to pay for their latest purchases, and 25% said they usually used their mobile devices to pay.

Dive Insight:

The study found a strong correlation between discovering items online and paying for them remotely via mobile smartphone, suggesting the mobile device was key in turning browsing into an actual purchase.

Other studies have posited that the online shopping process is becoming more of a mobile shopping process, but the PYMNTS.com report found an especially high-percentage of that activity. For instance, 42% of all clothing purchases found online were paid for using a mobile phone. Overall, 72.8% of consumers who paid remotely for a purchase via mobile discovered their purchases online. 

The study also found that 25.7% of consumers typically pay for their purchases with a smartphone regardless of where they are — in-store or online. That's good news for those that have been concerned about the possibility that mobile payments adoption had slowed in the U.S., leaving a market already trailing other regions of the world even further behind.

Looking at what forms of payment users are relying on to fund their mobile purchases, 37.1% of survey respondents said they use embedded debit cards, and 28.7% use embedded credit cards. 9.9% said they use PayPal, while 3.2% said they use Apple Pay. Amazon Pay and Walmart Pay garnered 1.7% each, the latter being a surprise, as Walmart Pay had been projected to grow faster than other mobile wallets over the last year.

The PYMNTS.com study also found high levels of satisfaction in the payments experience for people who pay via mobile devices. If consumers like the mobile payment experience, retailers may need to consider doing more to support those services, including enabling mobile checkout more widely in stores.