We are living in a mobile world and you have to keep up!

An employee stacks items to be shipped at the Amazon.com Inc. fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. on, Sunday, Dec. 1, 2013. More than 131 million consumers are expected to shop Cyber Monday events, up from 129 million last year, according to the National Retail Federation. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

It continues to amaze me as to how rapidly our buying habits are changing! Just yesterday, instead of going to the store, I bought my new Fitbit on EBay with one click, paid for it with my PayPal account with one more click, and within seconds I made my purchase at the price I wanted to pay!  No store to visit, no salesperson to talk to, no wasted time, and all done on my phone, and while walking down the street!! Don’t worry, it was not while I was crossing the street 🙂

Cybershopping has accelerated so fast that retailers are scrambling even faster just to keep up. We are now making 51% of our purchases online according to a survey published by United Parcel Service Inc.

We all know that millennials are born to purchase everything on line, and 54% are currently doing that. But older folks like me and you are actually making our purchases on line at a faster adoption rate than our younger counterparts!

Of course, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is Amazon and they accounted for about 60% of total U.S. online sales growth last year. More importantly, they have turned the shipping paradigm upside down. Everyone now expects free or at the very least low cost shipping and fast and even faster delivery.

If you are a business owner, and you depend on doing business on line, you have no choice – you must fully optimize your website for mobile capability if you want to have any chance to increase your web traffic and your sales.

 

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