With soaring growth, near-ubiquitous customer adoption and a place in every shopper’s pocket, phones are the most disruptive force to hit retail since retail went digital. Still, amazingly, many retailers still treat mobile as an afterthought – a feature that needs to be checked off their to-do list or worse, an entirely separate channel. These are probably the same folks who still say ‘smartphone.’

Over the past few years, we’ve included some mobile findings in our quarterly Shopping Index, and provided our share of insights individually to our clients, and on trade show stages. But that wasn’t enough. To help usher in a dramatically better mobile shopping experience, we needed to look deeper into shopper activity on mobile, to the less obvious but no less important elements that define a winning mobile commerce strategy.

We are launching Mobile Shopping Focus to provide retailers with insights into today’s mobile shopper. With these findings, we shine the light on the ups and downs of the current mobile shopping experience.

I encourage you to read the report, and most importantly, use the data inside to help inform and innovate your mobile shopping experience. Here are a few of the key findings:

‘Mobile First’ is here. We are now on the path to ‘Mobile-Only’

We’ve come a long way since “Can you hear me now?” and the relative novelty of mobile phones. Mobile devices drive the most traffic to retail sites,and are on pace for much, much more. In fact, by the end of 2017, shoppers will place more orders on phones than any other device. By the end of this year, shoppers will also choose to start more baskets on phones as well.

Mobile conversion still trails, but…

The conversion rate on phones falls well short of that on tablets and computers, but has improved as shoppers have gotten more comfortable shopping on phones and technology has streamlined the mobile shopping experience. With that in mind, we’ve introduced a new metric, Conversion Index, which helps quantify the performance on each device. This help retailers benchmark their efforts and performance. Over the past few years, the Conversion Index on phones has risen dramatically, and is up 70%

Checkout is a pain point, but…

As mobile basket rate has increased, it has become clear that shoppers who do not ultimately buy on mobile are stalling at the checkout. Notably, this means both sides of checkout. Most glaring is their reluctance to even begin the checkout process, as shoppers are 26% less likely to start a checkout on mobile than other devices.Those who do begin checkout on mobile are also 11% less likely to complete it. There is hope, though. First, the growth of checkout starts is highest on mobile (slightly edging out tablets). More importantly, the winds of change are picking up, with advancements from PayPal and the recent news that Apple Pay is coming to mobile web, shoppers have better tools and a streamlined path to purchase.

For an in-depth analysis of mobile shopping trends, gleaned from 400 million global shoppers, as well as mobile best practices from well-known retailers, download Mobile Shopping Focus.