US Retailer Mobile App Leaders And Best Practices Mobile apps play an increasingly important role in consumer experiences. Forrester data shows that 57% of US online adults expect companies to have a mobile app. Similarly, 43% say that they have purchased or ordered a product on a mobile app in the past three months. Mobile commerce — particularly during peak times like the holidays — continues to grow, making mobile optimization ever more critical.

Easy mobile experiences for consumers will be more crucial than ever. Adobe reported that for the 2023 holiday shopping season (November and December), mobile commerce in the US was more than 50% of total season revenue for the first time ever.

To address the need for access to payments across digital touchpoints, retailers are: Keeping up with mobile commerce capabilities. Fourteen of 28 retailers surveyed saw their mobile remote payment volume increase in 2024 as a percentage of their total e-commerce sales since 2023.

Emerging markets are quickly catching up, driven by widespread smartphone adoption, mobile commerce, and youthful populations. Developing economies feature marketplaces like Allegro, Flipkart, Lazada, Mercado Libre, and Shopee, which are expanding access, while digital wallets and account-to-account (A2A) transfers are facilitating cashless transactions. This rapid adaptation is transforming the global e-commerce landscape, presenting new opportunities for businesses and consumers alike.

As an example, Movable Ink’s year-in-review campaigns pull live data from mobile apps and create interactive experiences to showcase their interactions with a brand. By focusing on a genuine moment for the consumer first, Movable Ink can later reengage them for follow-on products. Brands must curate experiences for consumers to foster loyalty and ensure the brand’s messaging is resonating.

Logistical challenges, operational costs, and generative experiences beyond their control will force digital leaders to embrace generative AI (genAI). Some options are out of reach for the majority of the market, and others are too immature to address the pain points. However, influencer marketing will reinvent itself with a new level of control, and B2B sales will face a massive shift from human to automated selling.

They only look at and assess the fraud risk of payment transactions differently across channels: A payment made from a certain channel (e.g., web) is treated differently than a payment from a different channel (e.g., mobile application). With agentic AI-based commerce, transactions may become much more uniform, faster, and API-based, making it harder for existing design for manufacturing (DFM) solutions to find relevant signals of fraud.

You can use commerce solutions to digitize B2C selling processes, digitize B2B selling processes, and create a hub for commerce data. But to realize these benefits, you’ll first have to select from a diverse set of vendors that vary by size, type of offering, geography, and use case differentiation. Digital leaders should use this report to understand the value they can expect from a commerce solution vendor, learn how vendors differ, and investigate options based on size and market focus.

Retail media networks (RMNs) remain defined and confined by Amazon Ads’ runaway growth. RMNs’ cultural constraints limit their upside and frustrate advertisers’ workflows. Commerce media networks (CMNs), comprising first-party, data-rich enterprises other than retailers building high-margin ads businesses, are a different story. They’re qualitatively different from and often more digitally savvy than RMNs. Consequently, they’re poised for growth. Brands and agencies hold the keys to CMNs’ potential and RMNs’ revival. This report explains retail media’s hurdles, commerce media’s capabilities, and how advertisers can affect the changes they want made.

Among decision-makers planning to change their primary B2C commerce solution provider, 29% anticipate purchasing a single solution from one vendor. Twenty-seven percent plan to custom-build their next B2C commerce solution, either internally or with a services partner.