IDC today announced the results of a new survey revealing that mobile shopping "warriors" (hyper-connected individuals) and mobile shopping "warrior wannabies" (moderately connected individuals) will account for 28% or $127 billion of the $447 billion the National Retail Federation (NRF) predicts U.S. consumers will spend this holiday season.
The survey was designed to explore how consumers’ growing comfort with mobile commerce (m-commerce) and social media commerce (sm-commerce) will play out in the 2010 holiday shopping season.
According to results, m-commerce and sm-commerce are giving consumers greater advantage as they engage retailers on their own terms – even inside the store – within arm’s reach of merchandise at the moment of their buying decision.
"MSM-commerce introduces a new consumer shopping model which changes how consumers shop, not simply when and where they shop, as e-commerce has already enabled," said Greg Girard, program director, Retail Merchandise Strategies at IDC Retail Insights.
"It is clear that MSM-commerce already has an influence on consumers’ perception of brand value and their shopping intentions. We believe the retailers with superior mobile and social media commerce strategies in place will have a decided advantage," he added.
As revealed in the survey, mobile shopping warriors and wannabies represent the vanguard for the new age of m-commerce and, of particular interest, results suggest that the early maturity adult audience is an important part of this vanguard. Adults aged 25 to 44 years comprised nearly two-thirds of the mobile shopping warrior group while they comprised slightly less than half of consumers surveyed. In addition, adults aged 45 to 54 years were the most inclined to use their mobile information advantage; for example, asking for a better price to match one they find on their mobile device while in the store.
For retailers, the impact of mobile shopping warriors will be significant this holiday season as the survey reveals, across the board, retailers’ m-commerce competence greatly influences consumer perceptions about the brand. Further, an easy-to-use mobile website significantly influences consumers, across all age groups, on where to shop this holiday season.
Results also suggest that while the influence of social media outlets on buying decisions is growing, retailers continue to serve as the most important source of information on which consumers make their final purchase decisions. As such, retailers who have met the critical need for consumer-generated Web site content and easy-to-use product information will have the advantage this holiday season.
"Consumers’ increased comfort with using their smartphones to go online anywhere combined with their plans to use them more in the 2010 holiday season signals the beginning of a significant shift away from the capacity of the store channel to hold sway over consumers as they move to a purchase decision," concluded Girard.
By year-end 2013, location information or profile information from mobile phones will be used to validate 90 percent of mobile transactions, according to 
Location of device — This is based on the phone’s location information independent of the browser (IP address), so the user does not have to have his or her mobile browser application open for this to work; the phone only needs to be turned on. Enterprises may want to check and correlate the location of the device relative to anything else they know about the user’s location through other systems they may interact with at the enterprise. For mobile phones, there are two architectures that are used to obtain location information: One relies on device information (e.g., using the GPS-API applications that the user must opt into); the other employs APIs provided through mobile network operators that don’t require the users to opt in to releasing this information.