But Flurry, a mobile analytics company, is introducing the term “app & mortar” in a new report published today that explores the rise in smartphone shopping.

Clearly, the term is a play on the term “bricks and clicks,” which emerged in the late ’90s and became popular as e-commerce started to challenge physical retailers.

In some respects, this report confirms what we already knew about mobile commerce, but takes it a step further by figuring out who is benefiting the most right now from the trend. Surprisingly, it’s physical retailers.

In the report, Flurry analyzed the amount of time spent by consumers across more than 1,800 iOS and Android shopping apps in December 2012, compared to the same month a year earlier.

The biggest growth category by far was apps developed by retailers, such as Walmart, Macy’s and Gap.

Flurry said time spent in retail apps skyrocketed by 525 percent year over year. In contrast, online marketplaces, such as eBay and Amazon, increased by only 178 percent.

In terms of the share of shoppers’ time being spent inside the different apps, retailers also saw the biggest gains. In December 2012, shoppers spent 27 percent of their time inside of retail apps, up by 12 percentage points over the same month a year earlier.

The gain in share by retail apps came at the expense of online marketplace and daily deal apps, which declined year over year. The share of time being spent with online marketplaces decreased from 25 percent in December 2011 to 20 percent in December 2012. Daily deal providers, like Groupon and LivingSocial, fell to 13 percent from 20 percent.

Flurry did not offer a lot of analysis as to why this was occurring, but suggested that retailers were beginning to better respond to the move toward “online meeting offline shopping through mobile apps.” In general, 2012 was the first year that many online or physical retailers took mobile shopping seriously, so it was likely that the distribution of time spent would change with a huge surge in consumer interest and better options.

Interestingly, even though Flurry noted a decrease in time spent in online marketplace apps, eBay still easily beat its mobile revenue forecast (so it’s not clear if there’s a direct correlation between time spent and dollars spent). Last week, eBay said it recorded $13 billion in mobile revenue in 2012, exceeding its forecast of $10 billion. This year, the online retailer expects mobile revenue to hit $20 billion.

EBay is the most transparent of the larger e-commerce players when it comes to mobile’s contribution.

In contrast, an analyst’s best guess for Amazon is that about $3 billion to $5 billion of its annual sales are coming from mobile devices.

Goldberger will become senior vice president of Target.com and Mobile, and will run all aspects of the retailer’s e-commerce business, including user experience, merchandising and analytics. He starts Feb. 11.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Andy Page, Gilt’s president, was leaving Gilt. A spokeswoman confirmed that Page was ending his cross-country commute from San Francisco, which he’d been making weekly for the past three years.

The two departures cap a tumultuous year for Gilt, which has restructured its business several times in preparation for an initial public offering. Late last year, Gilt’s co-founder, Kevin Ryan, was replaced by Michelle Peluso, a Citigroup executive and member of Gilt’s board.

Gilt is dealing with the repercussions of its quick expansion into multiple verticals, and has not found a path to profitability in some of the niches. Some of the recent product cutbacks have included groceries and full-priced men’s clothing. It is also currently trying to sell Jetsetter, its travel division.

Gilt does not plan to fill the two new vacancies immediately. Peluso starts as CEO at the end of February, so she’ll be figuring out the right direction for the company, the spokeswoman added.

Goldberger was most recently executive vice president at Gilt, in charge of Home, Taste, Baby & Kids, and Business Development. And while Target will represent a much more corporate environment than Gilt’s startup culture, Goldberger will still face a number of challenges.

In 2011, Target’s online president left the company after the retailer’s website crashed from overwhelming demand for new designer apparel. The management change occurred soon after Target took control of its e-commerce site from Amazon.com. Since then, it has been competing fiercely with the e-commerce giant.

Earlier this month, Target announced plans to match prices from the top online retailers year-round, including Amazon.com, Walmart.com, BestBuy.com and Toysrus.com. It also said that its Target stores will match prices found at Target.com.

On Wednesday, the San Jose-based company will report fourth-quarter and year-end earnings, and eBay is expecting the holidays to have treated it well.

For the fourth quarter, it is projecting earnings per share of up to 58 cents on revenue of up to $4 billion. For the full year, profits are expected to be as high as $1.99 a share on up to $14.1 billion in revenue.

Analysts are a little more cautious.

The consensus is calling for eBay to earn a profit of 61 cents in the fourth quarter and $2.05 a share for the full year. Those numbers are best compared to eBay’s non-GAAP projections, which exclude some items. On a non-GAAP basis, eBay is projecting to earn up to 69 cents a share for the quarter, and up to $2.35 a share for the year.

One analyst, however, recently revised his target, saying he expects eBay to now hit the projected 69 cents a share.

The rise in the stock price over the past year stems from the work eBay has done to overhaul its marketplace business.

The turnaround has included fixing back-end technology, like search algorithms, and revamping the design, including a new logo and homepage. Innovation is also occurring in delivery with programs testing same-day delivery and pickup services. As the transformation has started to take hold, eBay has started to attract new users to the site via TV commercials.

Operating alongside eBay is its buddy, PayPal, which also had a strong year. In the third quarter, the payment division saw revenue jump 23 percent compared to the year earlier.

One particular subject the company will be eager to talk about this quarter is how much growth it is seeing from consumers shopping on their phones and tablet computers. In the third quarter, it forecasted that eBay and PayPal would each transact $10 billion in volume this year over mobile, or more than twice what they recorded in 2011.

It will not be a surprise if eBay blows past these numbers, given the number of times it has revised its figures upward. Other third-party reports confirm what eBay is already witnessing.

For instance, last week, eMarketer reported that U.S. sales over mobile devices increased 81 percent, to nearly $25 billion, in 2012. At that level, it said, mobile devices accounted for 11 percent of total U.S. e-commerce sales. In comparison, I’ve been reporting for the past few months that eBay’s mobile revenue is closer to 16 percent of its total sales (but those figures have been based only on estimates).

Amazon is reportedly generating half as much, or around 8 percent to 10 percent of its revenue from mobile.

Finally, analysts won’t just be looking for a recap of the company’s 2012 accomplishments on Wednesday, but will also be looking for hints about the future.

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether eBay can maintain its growth for another year.

On the marketplace side of the business, eBay anticipates growing revenue by helping brick-and-mortar stores like Toys “R” Us and Macy’s compete online. Meanwhile, PayPal has been slowly expanding into in-store payments, with the hope that 2013 will be the first year it brings in revenue from the business (or at least that’s what eBay hopes).

On Friday, eBay’s shares traded 1.3 percent higher to close at $53.70, which is just shy of its 52-week high of $54.20 a share.

When the company posts its Q4 results next week, we’ll know exactly how much mobile contributed to eBay’s revenue in 2012, but based on the new moves, it’s clear the online shopping giant is preparing for another banner year for mobile.

As part of the reorganization, which took place at the end of last year, mobile is now reporting into the company’s main marketplace division, rather than being a standalone product group.

The restructuring is similar to moves that other companies are making now that smartphones and tablets are becoming a main part of the user experience, and not just a second or third screen.

Steve Yankovich, eBay’s former VP of mobile and main spokesperson on the subject, has been appointed VP of innovation and new ventures. In his new role, he will focus on the company’s Red Laser application, which allows users to find product information by scanning a bar code. He is also working on developing new mobile experiences.

Additionally, Kevin Hurst, who was previously VP of product management at eBay Mobile, is now VP of mobile products. Instead of reporting to Yankovich, as he previously did, Hurst is now reporting to Dane Glasgow, the VP who heads up the company’s marketplace division.

Hurst will be based out of Portland, Ore., where eBay operates an office with 100-plus employees focused on mobile.

In an interview with AllThingsD, Hurst said it’s clear “we’ve gone through our incubation phase. We are pretty much going mainstream [with mobile].”

I’ve written about eBay’s mobile momentum before, mostly because it’s impressive. As of the end of September 2012, its apps had been downloaded 100 million times, and users have listed 100 million items to its marketplace using the app. It also forecast mobile revenue to hit $10 billion in 2012. Based on that estimate, I’ve calculated that mobile will make up about 16 percent of its total revenue.

That’s roughly double the percentage I reported last week based on one analyst’s recent estimate for Amazon’s mobile revenue.

The new apps being released today on iPhone and iPad are designed to decrease friction for both buyers and sellers in the marketplace.

For example, shoppers will find that the search bar now features auto-complete to anticipate what they are typing. The apps also provide an improved check-out experience, by allowing guests to make purchases without registering for an eBay or PayPal account, which was required in the past.

“It was a huge hurdle,” Hurst admits. “We’ll be working in 2013 on reducing that friction more.”

Selling has also become easier for those who like using their camera phone to take pictures of the item they are selling.

Now when listing items from the iPhone or iPad app, eBay will complete many of the fields for the user, especially in electronics, which have common characteristics. For instance, when attempting to sell a Kindle Fire, the app automatically fills in all the tablet’s specifications and provides a standard photo. It even makes suggestions for a sale price based on eBay’s current inventory.

Posting an item could literally take just a couple of minutes.

Additionally, the listing process can be started on the mobile phone and completed later on the tablet or PC.

“It’s very common for people to use their iPhones to access eBay and then later on iPads and then the PC. This multi-device world allows people to switch from one device to the other,” Hurst said.

Currently, eBay does not allow users to list items on eBay through the mobile browser because of technical limitations, like lack of access to the phone’s camera from inside the browser. “For the foreseeable future, we won’t offer it on the mobile Web,” Hurst said. “When it’s ready, we’ll add that.”

Both the iPad and iPhone apps are free and are available in iTunes. The Android application has already been updated with some of the new features, but a fully functional version will be available soon.

Image via mtkang

And while many retailers, especially smaller privately held companies, were bullish on the number of transactions coming from mobile, other larger companies — especially Amazon — have remained mum on the subject.

But in a report today, Citi Analyst Neil Doshi estimates that Amazon is generating $3 billion to $5 billion in annual sales from mobile devices.

If this is the case, the question that has to be answered is, is this significant?

It’s really not.

Take a look at the facts. Based on Amazon’s 2012 revenue forecast, the company’s net sales will total somewhere around $60 billion in 2012, which means that mobile sales will equate to 5 percent to 8 percent of total dollars spent on Amazon.

When asked about his estimate, Doshi called it “conservative,” noting that in 2012, Amazon’s percentage of mobile transactions could be as high as 10 percent. The estimate also takes into account only purchases made on Amazon.com from mobile, and not digital downloads from Kindle devices, for example.

Granted, moving the needle at a company the size of Amazon is extremely difficult, but that’s still comparatively low when looking at others in the space.

Take a look at eBay. It’s anticipating mobile sales to hit $10 billion in 2012, which is at least twice as much as Doshi’s conservative estimate for Amazon. That could equate to nearly 16 percent of eBay’s 2012 revenue — which is double what it was in 2011, and double Amazon’s estimated percentage in 2012.

Doshi provided other comparison points for some of the leading online players: About 15 percent to 25 percent of Google’s search queries are coming from mobile, as are 15 percent to 20 percent of page views on LinkedIn and 40 percent of Walgreens’ online prescription refills.

Amazon is trailing here, but given the Seattle company’s huge investment in mobile, that’s hard to believe.

If Doshi’s estimate took into account digital downloads, the numbers would be a lot higher. Take e-books, for example. It would be logical if a majority of the e-books being purchased are occurring on Amazon’s own Kindle e-readers and tablets.

Additionally, it has invested heavily in building its own app store on Android devices, which sells digital content, such as games. Amazon also has a dozen or more mobile applications available across several platforms, including iOS, Android and its own Kindle devices, which helps consumers shop its homepage in a streamlined fashion.

During the 2011 Christmas season, Amazon launched a mobile promotion that encouraged consumers to compare prices in a retailer’s store by using its bar-code scanning technology on its phone app. Anyone who used the app to scan a bar code received up to $5 off on any purchases made. The purpose was to increase usage of its mobile apps, but it seriously backfired when local retailers accused Amazon of encouraging “showrooming,” in which consumers test products out in the store, but end up buying them online.

Since the PR blunder, Amazon has been especially quiet about its mobile successes, so it’s really hard to tell if the 5 percent to 8 percent range is even close to accurate.

But beyond just knowing the percentage of revenue coming from mobile, it’s equally difficult to define success. As Doshi points out, it’s hard to know whether mobile results in incremental revenue, or if it is cannibalizing purchases that would have otherwise occurred online.

He writes:

[T]here has been a relatively healthy debate around the extent of Mobile Internet usage that’s really incremental, and accordingly the extent of monetization opportunities that are completely incremental (and do not cannibalize traditional desktop / PC Internet usage).

Doshi adds that people tend to use phones while they are out during the day and tablet usage spikes from 7 to 10 pm when they are on the couch — in other words, mobile usage is occurring when they aren’t in front of a PC and therefore could be incremental.

In all, Doshi believes Amazon and eBay are “likely to benefit from increased sales activity from mobile devices.”

That’s obvious. After all, purchases made on the PC and mobile monetize the same. However, that’s not the case for content companies, which find it much harder to generate revenue from advertising on the smaller screens.

Devin Wenig, eBay’s president of global marketplaces, said in an interview that next year the company will stop running mobile ads inside of its applications.

“We aren’t happy with the user experience and we don’t need the money,” he said.

This year, eBay displayed ads inside of its iPhone app as an experiment, but found that they were distracting and cluttered up the smaller screens. The ads also didn’t deliver meaningful revenue.

“It’s not worth it,” Wenig added.

Fortunately for eBay, it has options.

The primary way it makes money is through selling products online. Meanwhile, other media properties that are mostly supported by advertising are left dealing with the fact that ads on mobile don’t perform as well as they do online.

“Some don’t have an alternative business model. In this case, it’s better to be lucky,” said Wenig, who, as the former CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets, knows all too well what it’s like to be in the other camp.

Despite eBay’s lack of enthusiasm for mobile advertising, it is a huge promoter of mobile commerce in general, as it serves consumers wherever they want to shop.

The San Jose-based company announced back in September that its mobile apps had been downloaded 100 million times since launching four years ago. That’s not a trivial number, given that it’s equal to the number of active users on eBay last year. Additionally, this year, eBay expects to transact more than $10 billion in mobile volume from its apps. In fact, the company just hit its biggest mobile shopping day ever on Dec. 2.

For advertisers, this should be a reminder that there is still a lot of work left to be done to make advertising run smoothly across a range of mobile devices. EBay’s huge mobile audience should be attractive to marketers over the long term, but given that it was only conducting experiments for now, its decision to hold off on in-app advertising won’t be counted as a huge loss.

In a memo to investors, Wells Fargo Analyst Matt Nemer wrote that, for the first time in years, Amazon is giving some customers coupons for 10 percent off this holiday. Nemer hypothesizes that there are two logical explanations for the promotion: Either the e-commerce giant is trying to get customers active again or holiday sales are tracking below expectations.

Yesterday, comScore, which tracks online spending from computers using landline broadband connections, reported that so far this holiday, spending is up 13 percent year over year, which is below its 2012 prediction of 17 percent.

Nemer also offers a plausible explanation for why sales are slow: Procrastination. “As Amazon’s base of Prime users continues to grow, customers will be more likely to delay purchases,” he wrote.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

On Tuesday, Amazon gave customers even more reasons to wait. It announced that orders can be placed through Dec. 18 and still get free delivery in time for Christmas. In particular, Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 a year for free two-day delivery, can wait even longer. They can place orders until 7 pm ET on Dec. 21 to receive deliveries by Dec. 24. In some cases, Amazon will offer one-, two-, or even same-day delivery for a small fee.

ComScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said there is perhaps less urgency than there once was to make those final purchases. “What we’ve seen over the past few years is a tendency for heavy spending to continue late into the week of Green Monday (Dec. 10) and right up until Free Shipping Day, which this year falls on December 17,” he said in a release.

Quirky names have been given to several days around the holidays.

“Free Shipping Day” tends to be a widely celebrated event, with dozens of e-tailers offering to cover postage during a 24-hour period. However, the prominence of the day is wearing off as more online retailers offer free shipping year-round. On “Green Monday,” which is the second Monday of December, sales reached $1.275 billion, up 13 percent over last year, according to comScore. At that level, the day ranks as the third heaviest online spending day in 2012. So far this year, spending has totaled $29.3 billion during the first 40 days of the holiday shopping season, representing a 13 percent jump over last year.

At San Francisco’s Westfield mall, PayPal tells customers that is now accepted at a handful of retailers.

While that’s lower than what comScore was originally predicting, Hill Ferguson, PayPal’s VP of Global Product, said he’s seeing no indication that sales are falling below expectations.

In general, he said, the trend is for shopping to start earlier and end later, with the peak shopping days being closer to Christmas, rather than the more prominent heavy days, like Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) or Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving).

He attributes that shift, in part, to consumers shopping on their mobile devices. ”So much of shopping is generated by promotions, but with mobile you can make a purchase whenever or wherever you are, so people are willing to wait and not change their lives around what retailers are offering,” he said.

For instance, on Dec. 2, PayPal reported its global mobile payment volume hit a new high, exceeding its record set only six days earlier on Cyber Monday. PayPal’s parent company, eBay, saw its biggest mobile shopping day on Dec. 9.

Here’s a snapshot of the weekly trends for the past four years, showing how spending ramps up as we get closer to Christmas:

Leap Commerce is hoping to create a place where consumers can go to ask questions and get answers from experts on all kinds of products. “There’s an entirely new evolution around how people are considering or are thinking about purchasing items,” said Amit Chatterjee, Leap’s CEO and co-founder.

He said people are increasingly deliberate when it comes to buying mid-range items, like a dress, a stereo or a refrigerator. It’s not quite a car, but it’s more than picking up a tube of toothpaste. In today’s world, he believes reviews are not enough — you want “consideration from friends, or a buddy.”

While many companies are trying to crack the code on social commerce — and most have failed — Leap Commerce has another spin on the concept, with a lot of its expertise coming from Facebook engineers. Last year, Chatterjee co-founded the company with Karel Baloun, one of the first senior engineers to join Facebook in 2005. He is now Leap’s CTO. Leap’s head of products, Kent Schoen, also worked at the social network, spending five years on product management, marketing and operations for Facebook ads.

On Black Friday, Leap Commerce launched the latest iteration of its shopping app, called Spark.

The application, which is available on iPhone and iPad, is strikingly similar to its first app, Best Decision, except for the ability to get advice from friends and experts. It allows you to search across many e-commerce players by aggregating sites like Amazon and Gilt Groupe. While there’s no shortage of items to browse, the experience is a little clumsy since full-sized product pages from around the Web are scaled down and embedded into the app. To make it easier, however, items can be added to one universal shopping cart, where they can be purchased quickly.

Chatterjee says where the app really shines is in providing a fun, collaborative shopping experience where crowds can chat about some of their favorite items, making it very similar to Quora, the question-and-answer site. For example, he said, if you are considering buying a pair of skinny jeans, you can bring in images and tags from the product inventory, and you can say, “I prefer this pair for the following reasons.” Others can quickly vote up or down, and there are 16 emoticons that allow users to provide quick feedback without having to type a lot.

It’s still early days, but since launching the day after Thanksgiving, Chatterjee said, 2,000 questions have been asked, including 167 in the past 36 hours. He said the goal of Spark is to reduce shopping cart abandonment, since consumers will feel more confident about making purchases. Initially, Leap plans to monetize the app through affiliate fees, but eventually, Chatterjee said, they will have enough data to provide insights on users to brands, which can also propose questions about products on the site to get consumer feedback.

One standout measurement was the number of visitors coming to the crafts marketplace from mobile devices: It said that one-third of shoppers came from mobile, and that 30 percent of mobile visits came from tablets.

A blog post detailing the company’s holiday shopping highlights, however, did not once mention social networking, likely because there was little to share. Based on multiple third-party reports, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have contributed virtually zero in sales over Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

A year or more ago, mobile and social commerce were consistently mentioned in the same breath as two areas of potential growth for e-commerce. But as this holiday shopping season proceeds, it is clear that the two are not equal — so far, mobile is dominating. Social networking was a #noshow.

One clear reason for the disparity is that mobile phones and tablets are simply pocket- and purse-sized computers which allow consumers to shop wherever they are. In contrast, social commerce is more complicated. Consumers may discover new products through friends, or get advice via Facebook or Twitter, but being able to track those referrals back to where they came from is not always easy.

Additionally, sales that take place directly on social networks, as is the case with Facebook Gifts, are just starting to get off the ground.

According to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks more than a million e-commerce transactions a day from 500 retailers nationwide, online sales increased 30.3 percent on Cyber Monday compared to last year. The tremendous spike was driven in part by the adoption of mobile devices.

In particular, IBM found that mobile sales reached close to 13 percent of overall transactions, increasing more than 96 percent over 2011. The iPad, specifically, generated more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, driving more than 7 percent of online shopping. In contrast, sales coming from social networks actually decreased 26 percent year over year, generating only 0.41 percent of all online sales on Cyber Monday.

One note worth mentioning is that IBM does not track referrals from Pinterest, which, earlier this year, was on pace to become the most significant driver of social traffic to e-commerce sites — besting mature networks like Facebook and Twitter.

A study conducted by Adobe, which did take Pinterest into account, determined that social shopping had actually doubled year over year, representing 2 percent of total visits to e-commerce sites (that’s visits, not sales). According to the Adobe Digital Index, which tracks the majority of the top 20 online retailers, including Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart, Facebook and Twitter accounted for 77 percent of social networking traffic on Cyber Monday, Pinterest for 15 percent (up 105 percent year over year), while other sites contributed the remaining 8 percent.

It’s possible that e-commerce sites found it more valuable to focus on Pinterest this year, which would account for IBM seeing a decrease in referrals from traditional social networks. Still, social is obviously less mature. It will take awhile for it to achieve the kind of scale retailers need to move the needle. A recent report conducted by Booz & Co. suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

Slightly ahead of the holidays, a handful of venture-backed companies have announced TV advertising campaigns, including One Kings Lane, Fab.com, OpenSky, Gilt Groupe and Wayfair.

All of the companies are hoping to see a lift in sales and increased brand awareness, but the immediate beneficiaries of this trend will clearly be TV networks that have strong female demographics, like Bravo, the Food Network, HGTV, E! Entertainment, Oxygen, Lifetime and TLC.

The advertising campaigns could cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions, depending on the ads and how often they are going to run, but many of the companies are being conservative and labeling the launches as experiments.

The options range wildly between Wayfair’s 30-second spot, which was developed in-house for $30,000, and One Kings Lane’s two 30-second spots created by the premiere ad agency Wieden+Kennedy New York. Meanwhile, OpenSky is characterizing its commercial as a “modest test,” and Gilt Groupe said it hired Ocean Media, the agency behind ad campaigns for Priceline.com, Overstock.com and Angie’s List. Fab.com planned to run its ad in six U.S. markets for three weeks and then take it national if it was satisfied with results.

What’s interesting is that the campaigns are trying to drive traffic to the companies’ mobile sites and applications, capturing the behavior of viewers who sit on the sofa and watch TV with their phone or tablet in hand. That trend has been coined “couch commerce.”

For example, in Gilt Groupe’s minute-long spot called “High Noon,” one cowgirl is able to order a sparkling pair of pumps in a desert shootout because she uses the app to pull the trigger faster.

Wayfair said it’s also hoping to see a significant increase in mobile traffic. After launching its first ad campaign in September, Wayfair saw a traffic lift in the five minutes following the commercial. It said 35 percent of traffic was coming from mobile phones and tablets versus 13 percent normally. The home decor site’s Black Friday commercial (which is not too shabby, considering the budget), started running in late October.

The biggest indicator of whether these commercials actually pay off will be if they are still around in any significant way in the New Year, or if they will be short-lived tests. The one drawback for any of these boutique shopping sites is Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce during the holidays. As I wrote earlier today, 53 percent of U.S. consumers are planning to begin their Christmas shopping at the mega retailer.

But potentially, if the advertisements are creative and just darn cute enough, they could help change that behavior.

Below are the Wayfair and One Kings Lane commercials (others are linked above):

The Chicago daily deals company, which once focused solely on selling coupons for restaurants and spas, has quickly morphed into an online retailer, selling physical goods that are shipped to your front door. In about a year’s time, the side business has grown to account for 11.4 percent of the company’s North American revenue, totaling $193.7 million in the first nine months of the year.

Yesterday, on Groupon’s quarterly conference call, CEO Andrew Mason defended the decision to expand into products, even though it means lower margins and going up against some mighty competitors, like Amazon.

“We built something that fits squarely into our core customer value proposition of the discovery of curated offers and carves out a unique space in the retail e-commerce sandbox,” said Mason, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call. “We neither need to nor do we want to try to out-Amazon Amazon. We’ll never be about comprehensive product selection, but our skills at curating unbeatable offers are clearly resonating with our customers.”

The public markets did not respond favorably to the company’s enthusiasm.

In after-hours trading yesterday, Groupon’s stock plunged 15 percent, or 59 cents a share, and in the morning the news was still bothering investors. Shares fell nearly 30 percent today, or $1.16, to trade at $2.77 a share, way below the company’s last 52-week low of $3.68 a share.

The company’s market value now totals $1.82 billion, regrettably far below Google’s $6 billion buyout offer.

Groupon Goods offers a handful of products daily, making it similar to Amazon-owned Woot, which offers discounted merchandise for a limited time. Some of the electronics are priced in the hundreds of dollars, but most products fall between $10 and $40, filling a deal-seeker’s sweet spot. For instance, as of today, only 190 refurbished Motorola Xoom tablets had been sold for $229, but more than 1,000 Netgear wireless routers had been sold for $32; and more than 1,000 packs of men’s underwear had sold for $12. In particular, Mason illustrated Groupon’s reach by saying it was able to help Garmin sell nearly 30,000 GPS units in 24 hours.

Add to that free shipping and free returns on any purchases over $15 and the offer appears even better. Groupon will also be opening special “stores” for the holidays, including Thanksgiving- and Christmas-themed events. This will expand consumer interest in Groupon this year, compared to last year, when the company’s holiday focus was on resolution-type offers, like weight loss or gym memberships.

So, will Goods be less profitable than its original deals business, and what can investors expect to happen to the company’s original business?

On the call yesterday, Groupon’s CFO Jason Child addressed the topic of profitability.

He said the two businesses are reported differently, according to standard accounting practices. But if they were to be compared on an apples-to-apples basis, a local deal’s operating margin is roughly 10 percent to 12 percent vs. the Goods business, where he hopes margins will end up in the high-single digit percentages. “It should be actually quite similar,” he reasoned.

Mason addressed how the two businesses will work together. Going forward, he said less of the real estate in the emails Groupon sends out will be dedicated to local offers, which will mean coming up with new ways for customers to find them. Two possibilities, he said, are to focus more on Google and Bing search and discoverability on the mobile phone.

“Goods has been the primary driver of our growth over the last two quarters and is now at an annual billings run rate of nearly $1.5 billion,” Mason said. “This begs the question, what does this mean for our local business? Has it reached the limit? To be clear, we continue to believe in the size of the local e-commerce opportunity in front of us.”

But here’s one counterpoint: Fab.com, the quirky online retailer, said today that over the past few weekends, more than 40 percent of the retailer’s sales have come from mobile, and during some periods of the day, more than half of all sales are occurring on a phone or tablet. “I’m betting we’ll see more 50 percent-plus mobile day-parts within the next few months,” wrote Fab’s CEO Jason Goldberg.

In a blog post, the company provided an hour-by-hour breakdown of when traffic from mobile devices was the strongest. The tendencies show that mobile sales are most frequent in the morning and evening, and not surprisingly, that most PC sales occur while people are sitting in front of a computer at work.

Based on current rates, the mobile sales have nearly doubled over the past several months. In March, Fab was seeing roughly 20 percent of its daily sales coming from its mobile apps.

There’s probably at least one major reason for the discrepancy between what the analysts are saying and what Fab is witnessing — that’s scale. It takes a lot more to move the needle of a major retailer that’s already seeing a lot of traffic on its Web site than it does for a site like Fab, which was able to build a lot of organic traffic on mobile from the start. It also probably helped that Fab recently launched new iOS applications, which are more friendly to view on the iPad.

Here’s the hourly breakdown:

But it’s not what you may think. Sales are forecast to increase because there are two additional days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, giving consumers more time to shop than they had last year.

That was the conclusion of a 15-page report written by analysts at Citi Research.

What’s more, the report said that retailers will see very little impact from people making purchases on mobile devices like phones and tablets, or on social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest, even though there’s a lot of hype surrounding those two areas. “While mobile and social will likely grab headlines this season, retailers should concentrate on their ‘core technologies,’ namely e-commerce nuts and bolts, and strategies that integrate their traditional stores [with online ordering and in-store pick-up],” concludes the report.

The document, which was distributed to Wall Street investors, includes data from several key industry sources, including Shop.org’s holiday outlook, ChannelAdvisor’s holiday outlook and information from Retail Systems Research.

Overall, it finds that online spending is expected to increase by 20 percent this year, which is slightly less than what the industry experienced in 2011 when it reported growth of 23 percent. In general, e-commerce continues to see significant gains as spending shifts from offline to online. Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, noted in a report last year that e-commerce in the U.S. was making up only 8 percent of overall retail.

While it indeed takes a lot for companies such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart to see an impact from changes, consumers are shifting their behavior to mobile and social, although probably not as fast as investors would like to see.

EBay is one of the most vocal companies in breaking out the impact of mobile. It told AllThingsD recently that its mobile applications have now been downloaded 100 million times. Furthermore, it is projecting sales on mobile devices to hit $10 billion, which is double what it did last year. That roughly pencils out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue, if you base the calculation off of last year’s gross merchandise volume.

In contrast, Citi cites data from Forrester Research that says smartphones will account for 3 percent of e-commerce this year, increasing to 7 percent in 2016.

Social commerce is less mature, although that’s starting to change, too. According to research conducted by Monetate, which helps Best Buy, Urban Outfitters and other clients market their Web sites, Pinterest came out of nowhere over the past year to become one of the most significant drivers of social traffic to e-commerce. In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook made up 60 percent of the social traffic to retailers, while Pinterest made up 26 percent; by the holidays, it could surpass both Facebook and Twitter.

Citi’s report quoted specific data from Booz & Co. that suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

Citi’s biggest piece of advice for retailers is to provide as many choices to consumers as possible. For instance, users should be able to order online and pick up items in the store; retailers should have their databases synced so that they see the same prices in the store as they do online. Perhaps one of the most surprising nuggets was that brick-and-mortar retailers shouldn’t necessarily be losing out this holiday — after all, 90 percent or more of sales still occur offline.

The San Jose-based company says its mobile app has been downloaded 100 million times since its launch four years ago. That’s equal to the number of the service’s active users — those who bought, listed or sold something on eBay last year. The company is not saying how many of those downloaded apps are used regularly, but by at least one measure, activity is fairly high — users have now listed 100 million items to its marketplace using the eBay app, by taking a picture of the item with their phone and uploading all the data within minutes.

While many other companies are fretting about how they will make money from mobile, roughly 16 percent of eBay’s revenue this year will be coming from mobile devices. While that’s still a fairly small percentage, that number has doubled in just the past year.

Steve Yankovich, eBay’s VP of mobile, said the average transaction on eBay’s mobile apps runs between $30 and $45, in contrast to companies that sell 99-cent mobile games or virtual goods. On the high end, he notes that more than 9,000 cars are sold every week through the app, some of which are priced above $100,000.

Yankovich says they see the most sales coming from the iPhone out of all the smartphone apps, and a lot of transactions are also coming from the iPad and the mobile Web.

Yankovich calls mobile commerce “situational shopping.” Maybe you’re admiring a friend’s fancy new espresso machine, and you buy it on the spot from your phone, he said. Or you’re on the sidelines at your kid’s soccer game, or stuck on the train, or in a meeting, with some spare time for a bit of shopping. “I could be a consumer just for that moment,” he says.

So far this year, the most expensive item that was listed and sold on eBay via mobile was a $22,500 framed Peter Lik photograph. But if that sounds ridiculous, Yankovich has a plausible explanation: “There’s all kinds of things that are bought on mobile that are six figures. People who have lots of money are also busy,” he said.

EBay previously forecasted that it would hit $10 billion in revenue on mobile this year. Based on last year’s gross merchandise volume of roughly $60 billion, that works out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue. The main app, which gets a five-star rating on the iPhone, is available in eight languages and in more than 180 countries. The company has a separate app for cars and parts, called eBay Motors. It also operates Red Laser, which provides bar-code scanning technology, and an eBay Fashion app, which focuses on clothing. There are versions for a myriad of smartphone operating systems and tablets.

Among private companies that discuss mobile revenue, some are seeing even higher percentages, albeit off a much smaller base. Fab.com, which sells trendy home decor and apparel online, said recently that 30 percent of the company’s revenue and 30 percent of its daily visits are now from mobile. One Kings Lane, which is projecting $200 million in revenue this year, reports that mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales.

A more direct comparison would be to Amazon or Walmart, but neither breaks out mobile revenue, although Amazon does allude to positive metrics, such as selling more e-books than hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

Here’s the eBay infographic with all the fun facts:

But if you ask Wall Street, Groupon’s mobile efforts are worth practically nothing.

Groupon’s stock hit a new low this week after plummeting about 27 percent following its earnings release. Today, it’s essentially flat at $5.50 a share. At those levels, the four-year-old Chicago company is worth a piddling $3.6 billion, which is about two times the amount of cash it has on hand, or nearly half what Google offered to buy it for late last year.

With larger questions about Groupon’s growth prospects being asked, it’s hard to pay attention to any possible bright spots on the horizon.

Countless companies, from eBay and Amazon to much smaller firms, are trying hard to crack both social and mobile commerce. So, if Groupon does indeed have one of the biggest leads in mobile, what does it mean?

The falling stock price takes into consideration all of Groupon’s baggage, a load that would rack up substantial extra charges at an airline counter. The most recent concern is that the majority of the company’s growth is no longer coming from its super-lucrative coupons business, but rather from its lower-margin products business.

According to Mason, its mobile presence “makes us extraordinarily well positioned as we make this transition towards becoming the local commerce operating system.” He added that as effective as its email lists are for selling vouchers for spa services, restaurants or other activities, “the demand fulfillment opportunity is even larger than the demand generation opportunity.”

That message may as well be in code, but essentially what it means is that Groupon is well equipped to present a deal or offer when someone wants it, in contrast to its current business model, which is about selling offers in advance to generate demand for a business. To him, the opportunity is in creating “the first true global, local mobile e-commerce marketplace.”

Implementing this vision may be harder than Mason would like to admit.

For the past decade, mobile executives and others have promised that, someday, consumers will be alerted to nearby deals or specials on their phone as they walk by a coffee shop or a restaurant. For example, a free latte with a purchase of a scone, or free fries with a burger and milkshake. Perhaps, in a “mobile e-commerce marketplace,” a retailer wouldn’t necessarily push offers, but consumers could check their phone to find and maybe even purchase meals or items before walking in the door — a model that could look like Yelp plus the check-out experience all in one app.

Companies like Groupon and LivingSocial were considered clear front-runners for bringing these local commerce tools to scale, because both have a large user base and a dense enough footprint of local businesses for it to work. But LivingSocial recently backed out of providing instant offers, and I’d seriously question how many of Groupon’s customers are using the app to purchase offers in real time vs. purchasing everyday vouchers that are redeemed at some point in the future (the company does not break out those figures).

If Groupon is headed down this road of creating a “local mobile marketplace,” then it will intersect with other large organizations doing the same. EBay-owned PayPal is working with major retailers like Home Depot to roll out mobile services, including payments and other futuristic offerings. Likewise, Square made a huge move into the space last week when it announced that it will be processing all of Starbucks’ credit and debit transactions and that the java giant would invest $25 million in the start-up. Eventually, those two companies could also create a mobile network together for ordering lattes — not just paying for them.

In particular, Square’s deal with Starbucks must sting the most. Last week, Starbucks’ Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz went on a media tour with Square Founder Jack Dorsey to talk about the partnership. Remember, it was only four months ago that Schultz was on Groupon’s team before he abruptly stepped down from the board in April.

iStockphoto.com/mbortolino

In the U.S., e-commerce sales reached $43.2 billion in the second quarter — up 15 percent compared to the year-ago period, according to comScore.

The quarter marked America’s seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, as consumers get even more comfortable spending online and having products show up on their front porches.

What’s more, Amazon grew twice as fast as the overall market. The big-box retailer of the Web said that in the second quarter, it grew 32 percent if you take away the impact of foreign exchange. Likewise, eBay’s sales rallied in the second quarter, increasing 23 percent.

In contrast, brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling. For example, Best Buy’s same-store sales were down 5.3 percent in the three-month period ended May 5.

The comparisons are not entirely fair, because both Amazon and eBay lump together U.S. and international sales, and Best Buy separately reported that online revenue was up 20 percent, but it provides some perspective on how fast the shift from offline to online is happening.

What’s more, while comScore provides one of the most comprehensive reports for gauging e-commerce spending, its numbers do not take into account shopping conducted over cellphones and tablets — and that’s becoming hard to ignore.

In the second quarter, CEO John Donahoe said, he saw “a staggering surge” in mobile commerce that did not exist just a few years ago. Now eBay is expecting both its marketplaces division and PayPal to transact $10 billion in mobile volume this year, or more than double 2011.

Amazon does not break out mobile sales, but other, smaller, sites are also reporting significant mobile traffic. For example, One Kings Lane, an online home decor site, said mobile is making up 22 percent of the company’s sales.

Two other findings from the Q2 comScore report:

• The top-performing online product categories were: Digital content and subscriptions, consumer electronics, flowers, greetings and gifts, computer hardware, and apparel and accessories. Each category grew at least 16 percent compared to the year-ago period.
• 42 percent of e-commerce transactions included free shipping, representing a seasonal pullback from a fourth-quarter high of 52 percent.

Additionally, to fuel the company’s growth, it has plans to hire aggressively, and recently appointed four new high-level executives.

“We want to be the most-visited premium home site in the U.S.,” Mack said, adding that the goal is to rival household names, like Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, West Elm and Restoration Hardware.

The four new hires are VP of Brand Development Sascha Jamall, who most recently ran brand and sourcing at Michaels Arts and Crafts; VP of Legal and General Counsel Susan Stick, who previously held a similar title at Skype; Chief People Officer John K. Anderson, who joins from Quidsi, a subsidiary of Amazon.com; and Chief Product & Technology Officer Jean Sini, who most recently ran engineering at Mint.com.

By the end of the year, Mack said, the San Francisco company could add 30 to 50 employees to bring the total headcount to as many as 350. Most of the new hires will be engineers, he said, adding that Sini has a “blank check” to add as much talent as needed.

One Kings Lane was founded in late 2008 by Susan Feldman and Alison Pincus (wife of Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, the social games company); Mack joined two years ago.

The online retailer sells designer items for the home, ranging from large oriental rugs to sophisticated and modern side tables. Most of the products are sold at deep discounts, and because of limited inventory and scarcity of availability on other sites, some items can sell out in as little as five minutes. If they don’t, they are pulled from the site within 72 hours.

Mack, who is insanely bullish about the company’s prospects, said that even though it is not yet profitable, he doesn’t consider the plans frivolous. Over the past year, One Kings Lane has been able to double top-line revenue, while also managing to cut losses in half.

Still, despite the retailer’s accomplishments, it has remained fairly quiet about its plans, with the exception of announcing several large funding rounds. Last September, the company raised $40 million from Tiger Global Management, Institutional Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Greylock Partners. The round brought total funding to $67 million and valued the firm at $440 million.

Since launching more than three years ago, the company has slowly expanded beyond its roots as a flash sales site.

In 2010, it added “tag sales,” which lets larger-scale interior designers sell off unused items on the site, and this year, it introduced a marketplace, allowing third-party boutiques to sell their unsold inventory on the site — although not all that apply are approved.

To keep up with demand from its five million members, Mack estimates that the site is now listing between 1,000 and 2,000 new products every day, but the goal is not to increase that number too much. Instead, he said, the company wants to stock more of each item to keep from selling out. That way, the site continues to be easy to browse, unlike large retailers that stock millions of items.

Mack said there are two primary ways that One Kings Lane will grow in the future.

The first is by gaining a larger share of home decor purchases, as more shopping shifts online.

He estimates that in 2007 the online home decor market totaled $9 billion, and that by 2015 it will be worth $23 billion. He also anticipates shopping to continue to increase on mobile phones. Already, mobile makes up 22 percent of the company’s sales, and it’s still growing. Other flash sales sites, including Gilt Groupe and Fab.com, are also hoping to benefit from this trend.

The second opportunity is for One Kings Lane to begin designing its own product lines, which is precisely why Mack hired Jamall, the company’s new VP of brand development. As part of Jamall’s responsibilities, he will work with existing suppliers to create one-of-a-kind products for the site. The products could either carry the vendor’s name or the One Kings Lane brand.

At some point, Mack said, an IPO is an option for One Kings Lane, but he isn’t in a hurry — especially as it spends aggressively during this hiring blitz.

“We are enjoying being nimble and operating in the private capital markets,” he quipped.

In what is becoming a routine move, the company said today during its second-quarter earnings release that it is now expecting eBay and PayPal mobile to each transact $10 billion in volume this year.

“That’s more than double 2011,” said eBay’s CEO John Donahoe, who called it “a staggering surge” in mobile commerce that did not exist just a few years ago.

As recently as January, eBay was predicting that mobile shopping — either through its apps or the browser on either a phone or tablet — would hit $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume in 2012. Likewise, PayPal was expected to hit another $7 billion in mobile total payment volume.

Last year’s numbers were similarly revised multiple times before the end of the year, when eBay’s final mobile tally stood at $5 billion and PayPal’s totaled $4 billion.

“The line is blurring between online and offline, and that behavior is happening because of the investments we have made in mobile,” he said.

As part of the company’s second-quarter conference call, analysts peppered Donahoe with questions about whether these sales were incremental to the company’s traditional business. However, he dismissed those fears; if someone wants to buy a car part while under the hood or while walking down the street, they better let them.

“We believe it is helping our growth rate and helping us be the leader in mobile commerce and payments,” Donahoe added.

It’s hard to say which retailer is a leader in mobile. Others, such as Amazon, have been reluctant to disclose how much traffic is coming from mobile devices. Donahoe said there are obvious leaders, like Amazon and eBay, but beyond that he questions if other retailers are doing significant revenue on mobile.

“If you think of it as an app-based world, we aren’t going to carry around a Neiman Marcus app and a Walmart app and a Best Buy app. By being a marketplace, it’s a single app that gives you access to a lot of things. That’s why we are getting viral traction on it.”

Just yesterday, eBay announced it acquired Card.io for an undisclosed price. The year-old company allows users to skip the tedious process of entering their credit number into various fields at check-out by taking a picture of the card. With that technology under its belt, Donahoe said you can envision a world where you take a snapshot of a credit card and a driver’s license to create a PayPal account.

“Consumer acquisition leads to user engagement, which leads to merchant ubiquity,” he said.

Other figures released today:

• eBay apps have been downloaded 90 million times, up from 65 million in January.
• People are using the apps to list almost two million devices every week, and a handbag is purchased every 30 seconds.

That’s just one of the offers being pitched on Hotel.com’s new Facebook application called “Deals.”

In the race to be more social and compete against discount daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, or mobile apps like HotelTonight, there’s more than one example of traditional travel sites having a hard time getting it right.

Yesterday, Hotels.com, an affiliate site of Expedia, threw its hat into the ring with its own Deals Facebook application, which claims to deliver “tailored deals that are informed through user preferences and friend activity.”

But not only is it difficult to understand how to apply a discount, sometimes the app even spells it out in black and white that there is not a discount at all.

For example, the offer for a downtown Seattle hotel listed at the very top of my results offers: “Stay 2 nights and save 0% off your stay!” At a Hilton in San Francisco, it offered rooms from $161, but when specific travel dates were entered into the search bar, the room rate jumped to $237 — the same amount offered on the Hotels.com site. Additionally, a summer sale was offering 20 percent off the stay at the Hilton, but it was not at all clear how to redeem that offer, and the prices never changed.

A spokesperson did not immediately reply to emails seeking comment.

Besides providing deals, the application also taps into your social network to make booking rooms more informed by people you know. After connecting to Hotels.com through my Facebook account, I was able to add destinations such as Honolulu, London, Paris, Rome and others to my wish list.

I was also able to see that 61 of my friends have visited San Francisco, 19 friends had visited Sea-Tac (as in, the Seattle airport), and 17 friends had visited San Jose. Unfortunately, none of my friends have been to Rome, although I don’t believe that could possibly be the case.

After clicking around on a number of features, I never saw specific hotel recommendations from a friend — and I’m not entirely sure if that will be a feature. But pulling off a clever social integration is difficult because of the magnitude of places to visit and hotel rooms to stay in. As an example, TripAdvisor launched a Friend-of-a-Friend feature in April, which allows users to see if a hotel has been reviewed by Facebook friends and their immediate friends. Before extending it beyond immediate friends, it was always hit or miss, but now connections are frequent.

Providing meaningful connections is difficult, so getting the discounts right would seem like the easy part. But apparently it’s not. I noticed that when Priceline released a new mobile phone app in April, it also struggled to make the promotions clear and meaningful enough to make it worthwhile to continue coming back to use it again.

The app, which launched under its Booking.com subsidiary, pitched last-minute hotel deals at up to 50 percent off. But from what I could tell, Booking Tonight was a replica of its online site, offering the same selection of hotel rooms at the same price.

By offering social and mobile applications without a clear value to the consumer, it’s like leaving a placard hanging on the knob telling start-ups to come in and clean house.

Of course, e-commerce is a beneficiary of economic belt tightening, but there are much bigger factors at play. Economic pressures are combining with technology-driven disruptions to create a perfect storm of online opportunity. These disruptions are nothing new; what is new is the pace at which they are happening. Big, established retail players are having trouble adapting to this accelerating pace of change, while nimble start-ups feed and thrive on it.

I see three megatrends driving e-commerce change that I call the Three P’s: Personalization, Pinterest and iPad (well, iPad almost starts with a P). Together they ensure that U.S. e-commerce will continue to experience double-digit growth and pass the $100 billion mark in less than five years.

I recently attended D10, the D: All Things Digital conference, and the message from leaders like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Tim Cook, Reid Hoffman and Larry Ellison confirmed enthusiasm on the future of ecommerce.

A lot of the private discussions I had at D10 also focused on the magnitude of this re-invention. Most agree that these three drivers are fundamental, and that the pace of change has never been this aggressive.

P1: Personalization — It’s All About You!

The emergence of the visual web — touchscreens and other new front-end technologies — enables a much easier personalization experience. For the first time, e-tailers can dish up very realistic virtual renderings of personalized SKUs that are then made to order.

Brands like Bonobos, Cafepress, Customink, Gemvara, Modcloth, Nike, Quiksilver and Vans are all revolutionizing online shopping, providing a rich, interactive and even creative experience. At Gemvara, for example, you can customize a piece of jewelry by selecting a design template and filling in your desired metal and stone. In real time, you see a realistic, virtually-rendered representation of your one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry. Gemvara then builds the jewelry to your specifications and delivers it in less than 10 days.

Another way to personalize the shopping experience is through social curation of products. Social technologies are enabling e-tailers to identify and target consumer tastes increasingly accurately.

With social sentiment tools, analytics and “big data” insights, e-tailers today can match products to consumers more scientifically, and on a much more granular level. Modcloth is a great example of an e-tailer applying a synergistic mix of analytics and social technologies to procure the right products for its community of consumers.

Innovative e-tailers are further personalizing the online shopping experience by empowering customer service and creating intelligence concierges. Imagine sales reps armed with answers to frequently asked questions, your purchasing history and your personal tastes. This emerging customer service looks and feels much different from the traditional help desk you have learned to dread. The best e-tailers are leveraging data to deliver a personalized customer experience that is not only better but more cost-effective.

P2: Pinterest — The Power of Eye Candy

Pinterest’s rise has been meteoric, even by social media standards. Launched in March 2010, the image-sharing site hit the 10-million-user mark in record time, and is already the third-largest social media platform behind Facebook and Twitter, driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.

According to a recent Shopify study, much of that referred traffic converts to sales. While Facebook still drives considerably more traffic, Pinterest referrals are 10 percent more likely to lead to a purchase. Some other significant statistics:

• Pinterest users are older and have more purchasing power.
• Pinterest-referred purchases are twice as big as those that are Facebook-referred.
• The most popular retailers on Pinterest are Nordstrom, Williams Sonoma, Barneys, Vera Bradley and Neiman Marcus, indicating a higher-end user base.
• In the year ended March 31, 2012, Pinterest’s share of social-media-driven revenue for retailers leaped from 1 percent to 17 percent.

Online retailers at the forefront of product customization agree. Gemvara reports that Pinterest referrals are outpacing other customer acquisition channels. Ultimately, I expect Pinterest to do for e-commerce what Facebook did for advertising. I see Pinterest as the platform that helps power the next generation of “lean-back” e-commerce experiences.

P3: iPad — The Ideal “Lean-Back” E-Commerce Device

Don’t get me wrong. If you know exactly what you want, search is still a very good tool. However, if you are in a more casual “gathering” mode, search comes up short. In my mind, iPad + Pinterest enable what Web 1.0 lacked and what physical catalogs have provided for many years: a “lean-back” e-commerce experience. Pinterest and the iPad interact seamlessly, further fueling the e-commerce channel shift toward a more delightful and engaging shopping environment.

According to a 2012 Q1 Mobile Study sponsored by RichRelevance, mobile’s share of e-commerce grew nearly 250 percent in the year ended March 31, 2012 — and the iPad accounts for two-thirds of the shopping, browsing and purchasing in this emerging channel. Compared to other mobile shoppers, iPad users:

• spend significantly more time and money on retail sites,

• have much higher conversion rates,

• spend dramatically more, while buying fewer, more expensive items.

In fact, 90 percent of all mobile revenue is generated via iPads. The iPad’s average order value is even creeping ahead of desktop-based orders.

E-Commerce Roadmap

Disruptive forces, both technological and economic, are driving the retail channel shift inexorably toward e-commerce. This shift is accelerating as customer-facing technologies improve — especially those within the Three P’s described above.

E-commerce players must innovate quickly and continually to succeed under such rapidly changing circumstances. These factors clearly favor nimble start-ups, although companies like Nike are proving that established brands can adapt. Startup or not, companies vying for a piece of the e-commerce pie must innovate around the Three P’s or die.

The winners will be the brands who understand the Personalization, Pinterest, and iPad mega-drivers and leverage them to create rich and delightful customer experiences.

Sergio Monsalve @vcserge is a Partner with Norwest Venture Partners.

The Atlanta-based company’s mobile app tries to be a resource to consumers who are looking for local merchants and events, sort of like the Web’s original CitySearch service from years ago — except that it’s on mobile. The app also distributes coupons to restaurants, but instead of charging consumers for the deals, like Groupon does, they are free, and merchants pay a flat rate to Scoutmob each time one is redeemed.

Investors in the company’s second round include AOL Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, Capital Broadcasting, Cox Enterprises and Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. To date, Scoutmob has raised $5 million, which means that even if it wanted to, it doesn’t have the resources to go up against Groupon and LivingSocial.

In an interview, Scoutmob co-founder Michael Tavani said the company gets lumped into the daily deals category, but said that from day one, “we tried to differentiate ourselves and to be more of a mobile company.”

So far, the strategy has worked.

The app, which is available free on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, has 1.2 million users who have redeemed one million offers. To date, the company has launched in 10 cities, with varying success rates. Some markets, like Seattle, don’t have many deals yet, while other cities, like Atlanta or Washington, D.C., are used more.

Because of its emphasis on mobile, the company was also able to to score a partnership with payment processing company First Data Corporation.

“It’s crazy, we are a two-and-a-half year-old company, and every week we have the largest payment companies in the world contacting us,” Tavani said. ”They are worried that if they don’t have mobile engagement, then what do they have?”

First Data processes about 55 percent of all transactions in the U.S., and will help Scoutmob close the loop of offering a discount, making a purchase and earning loyalty points.

The new funding will be used to support the company’s next wave of product development, which will include building out a mobile rewards program with the help of First Data and other payment companies it signs up.

Tavani said it will work like this: When users make a purchase at a Scoutmob location using a credit card, they’ll accrue points automatically. Once enough points have been accumulated, they can be redeemed at any Scoutmob retail location.

Unlike traditional loyalty programs, which require consumers to go to the same coffee shop 10 times in order to earn a free coffee, Scoutmob will let consumers earn and redeem points by visiting any merchant in its network. It’s similar to frequent flyer programs, where miles can be earned at a variety of merchants and then redeemed at a handful of airlines.

“We want to be the equivalent of an airline reward program, but for local,” Tavani said. “That’s exactly what we want to be.”

Scoutmob has landed in a sector spanning local businesses and mobile payments, which is ripe from innovation and extremely crowded by well-funded start-ups and massively large incumbents. But Tavani argues that it’s a level playing field.

“There’s going to be multiple players and lots of winners,” he said. “Groupon and LivingSocial are two with a gigantic lead. But we can go out and visit merchants today — there’s no one preventing us from having those conversations.”

But in a new survey conducted during the first quarter, Nielsen discovered that the two devices are not being used for the same kinds of shopping-related activities.

For instance, U.S. consumers are most likely to use their smartphone to find a store and check prices, whereas tablet owners are more likely to do PC-type activities, such as researching products and reading product reviews.

Owners of both devices report frequently making purchases, including 42 percent of tablet owners and 29 percent of smartphone owners.

Last Christmas, the mobile shopping category first started to get retailers’ attention in a big way, leading to new vernacular such as “m-commerce,” or more fun things, like “couch commerce,” which conjures up images of consumers shopping while sitting in front of the TV.

Most retailers, like Amazon, haven’t started breaking out the mobile contribution, but eBay is forecasting that purchases made from apps or the browser on a phone or tablet will hit $8 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume this year, up 60 percent from $5 billion in 2011.