Worldwide mobile payment transaction volume 2010-2017

This statistic shows the global mobile payment transaction volume from 2010 to 2013 with a forecast for 2017. The worldwide mobile payment volume in 2012 was 163.1 billion US dollars and is expected to grow to 721.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2017.

Mobile Payments
The spread of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has lead to the strong growth of mobile commerce. In the second quarter of 2013, mobile e-commerce spending in the United States amounted to 4.7 billion US dollars. The possibilities to shop on mobile devices or specially designated mobile apps are plentiful: online market leaders eBay and Amazon offer designated mobile shopping apps and sites and brick-and-mortar stores such as BestBuy or Target are also catching up. In many physical stores, mobile devices can also be used as payment method by using NFC technologies to scan digital wallets. A recently popular example is coffee chain Starbucks’ partnership with mobile payment provider Square, which allows Starbucks customers to pay for their orders through the Square Wallet app.

Aside from physical goods, other strong drivers of mobile spending are digital content or event tickets. With the increasing affordability of media downloads and streaming, online stores such as Google Play or Apple’s iTunes are able to generate revenue through digital media sales. It is common for mobile gaming apps to generate part of their revenue through virtual content and item sales. Chat apps such as LINE or Kakaotalk have begun to monetize through the sales of stickers and games, all of which are paid through the mobile device they are running on.