Mobile Now Controls More than One-Fourth of Online Transactions, Key Report Says

More evidence emerged in recent days to document the surging rise of mobile payments worldwide.

For the first time, mobile transactions account for more than 25% of all global online traffic on the Adyen platform, the company said while releasing its quarterly Mobile Payments Index last week with statistics on the fourth quarter of 2014.

In the quarter, mobile-originated transactions made up 25.8% of online payments, compared to 18.8% in the year-earlier quarter and 23.3% in the third quarter, according to Adyen’s report. Holiday-related activity led to a 26.6% rate in December and 26.1% in November.

The rise in mobile activity is also related to an increase in the number of e-commerce businesses promoting a so-called mobile-first approach to customers, according to Adyen, a global provider of transaction-gateway services based in Amsterdam and with U.S. offices in San Francisco and Boston.

“Across all industries including retail, gaming, ticketing, and of course digital goods, we see the emergence of successful businesses offering a mobile-only experience,” said Roelant Prins, the company’s chief commercial officer, in a statement. “For many companies, mobile is now the primary sales channel, rather than simply a key sales channel, aided by the accelerated growth of mobile payments globally in the last quarter of 2014.”

Consumers seem to make a sharp distinction between smart phones and tablets, using the latter primarily for hard goods and the former for digital, says the report. For digital goods, which include games and songs but also tickets and hotel reservations, phones accounted for 20% of online transactions but tablets for only 7%. But for goods such as furniture, appliances, and groceries, tablets take pride of place at 19% of transactions compared to less than 10% for handsets.

Overall, however, smart phones are by far the preferred device for mobile payments. They controlled 58% of mobile payments in the quarter, with 42% on tablets. This smart-phone dominance is up from 53% in the fourth quarter of 2013. Adyen credits the emergence of larger screens for driving the increasing smart-phone preference.

Among tablets, the Apple iPad is dominant, controlling just over one-third of mobile transactions. Similarly, iPhones enjoy a wide lead over phones using the Android mobile operating system, 32.3% vs. 25.3%. But Android is catching up. A year earlier, its share was 20%, compared to 32% on iPhone and more than 40% on iPad. “If the current trends persist, Android may surpass the iPhone and iPad in the latter half of this year,” Adyen predicts in the report.