Dive Brief:

• About 66% of 205 users of Trustlook cybersecurity products said they plan to shop on a mobile device this holiday season, and 45% will spend more than $250 on mobile, according to Trustlook survey results.

• More than 83% of expected mobile shoppers surveyed said they either "Strongly Agreed" or "Agreed" with feeling secure about shopping transactions during the holidays, whereas for non-shoppers, the percentage was 53%.

• Meanwhile, the home electronics and clothing categories are expected to see the bulk of these purchases. Both categories were well ahead of segments such as toys, computer hardware or books.

Dive Insight:

A YouAppi study from last month suggested that the percentage of consumers planning to shop via mobile apps this holiday season could be as high as 85%. This study projects a lower, but still impressive percentage, although the 66% figure came from a survey of just a couple hundred Trustlook users.

Meanwhile, a study from Adobe earlier this month suggested that retailer web traffic from mobile devices will surpass traffic from desktops this holiday season, pointing yet again to the importance of mobile this season. Even if we disregard the variance in percentages, the takeaway from all of these holiday shopping studies seems to be the same – this holiday season represents a major tipping point for mobile shopping.

As Trustlook noted in its survey, there are numerous reasons to believe this will be the case. Faster network speeds and constantly improving mobile devices play a role in how likely shoppers are to shop on mobile and feelings of security among those mobile shoppers leads to increased mobile shopping activity.

Trustlook, being in the business of security, believes the latter factor might be the most significant driver in increasing holiday shopping growth, but what might be more significant is the amount of work retailers and brands have done recently to improve their shopping sites and apps.

For example, BJ’s Wholesale Club has spent the better part of the last several months enhancing both its mobile web shopping experience and its mobile app. Meanwhile, eBay recently went live with image search capabilities for its mobile app, and a whole bunch of retailers have added augmented reality features to their mobile shopping apps.

There are a lot of reasons why mobile users may shop through their mobile devices this holiday season, but retailers have also started to do a much better job of improving the mobile shopping experience. A big payoff may come this holiday season, but this kind of work should continue paying off for years to come.