Mobile commerce is growing rapidly in South Korea, according to Q1 2015 data from Statistics Korea (KOSTAT). Business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce sales were up 79.2% over Q1 2014 on mobile devices?more than four times the growth rate of total B2C ecommerce sales over the same period.
KOSTAT also reported that mobile ecommerce sales were up 125.8% in 2014 as a whole compared with 2013.
In Q1 2015, according to KOSTAT, travel accounted for the largest share of mcommerce sales in South Korea of any product category, at 16.0%. That was down from 19.5% a year earlier. Clothing was the second-largest purchase category, followed by household goods and motor vehicle parts and accessories, and food and beverages.
According to Criteo, 50% of all ecommerce transactions at digital retailers in South Korea were mobile in Q1 2015, up from 45% in Q4 2014. Almost all such transactions came from smartphones rather than tablets.
September 2014 polling by the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) found that clothes, shoes, sports items and accessories were the most common mobile purchases in South Korea, and were bought by nearly eight in 10 mobile shoppers in the country. Movie and concert tickets came in a distant second, followed by books, magazines and newspapers.
GlobalWebIndex reported that 40% of internet users in South Korea researched products on mobile phones in Q4 2014; 37% made a purchase via such devices. According to Q4 2014 data from We Are Social and the Interactive Advertising Bureau Singapore (IAB Singapore), 62% of the population of South Korea had made a digital purchase in the past month. Just over half that number, or 37%, had made a purchase via mobile phone in the same time period.
KISA found that 58.6% of digital buyers in South Korea had made a purchase via smartphone in 2014, up from 43.2% the year before. Tablet buying was slightly down, from 3.0% in 2013 to 2.6% in 2014. In October 2014, 41.8% of digital shoppers in South Korea told DMC Report that the smartphone was their primary device for digital shopping?1.8 percentage points ahead of those who preferred desktops. Just 1.4% of respondents shopped mostly via tablet.
eMarketer estimated in December 2014 that there were 26.6 million digital buyers in South Korea last year, or 73.0% of internet users in the country. At the same time, we estimated that 9.8% of total retail sales in South Korea would be digital this year. eMarketer does not break out mobile commerce sales or mobile shopper and buyer numbers for South Korea.
