Commerce - E, M and now F....

Over in the Americas it looks like a wonderful year for ecommerce. But not only E commerce but F and S commerce too. The newest of all the commerces, Facebook and Social.

According to comScore, an estimated $37 billion will be spent online over the festive period this year, up 15 percent on last year’s $32 billion.

Meanwhile, Shop.org’s eHoliday survey anticipates that 73.7 percent of retailers will use Facebook pages to reach out to shoppers, a marked increase from 57.1 percent last year.

Indeed, according to CNBC, 18 percent of chief marketing officers say that social media promotions are their top sales priority this weekend.

To be sure, Facebook users have an enormous selection of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to tickle their fancy. eCommerce platform Payvment, for example, has launched a special Black Friday deals section for its Shopping Mall, offering up to 80 percent off products from its list of over 100,000 retailers.

But what about in the UK, what are we up to with our own Mcommerce? Well according to some -

24% of U.K. consumers have used a smartphone to access web sites while shopping, of which 50% accessed retail websites and 48% social media sites (Source: eDigitalResearch and IMRG Survey, 2011)

40% of U.K. consumers using a smartphone while shopping ultimately made a purchase in-store, online or via mobile (Source: eDigital Research and IMRG Survey, 2011)

55% of U.K. consumers have seen a QR code while shopping and 33% of shoppers who have seen a QR code have scanned one (Source: eDigital Research and IMRG Survey, 2011)

It is predicted that there will be 20.76 million m-commerce users in the UK in 4Q11 (Source: Mobile Consumer Trends, 2011) - so things are looking good.