Over the last ten years, shopping has undergone an extreme makeover, allowing users to purchase goods literally anytime and anywhere. With a simple tap on their screens, buyers can effortlessly compare products, check prices, study reviews, and even remotely try on preferred items.
According to Statista, mobile commerce revenue in 2025 was estimated to reach approximately $2.5 trillion, nearly doubling over the previous four years and accounting for 63% of total retail e-commerce.
As shoppers feel open to spending more money buying products online, m-commerce companies continue to invest in new ways to surpass competitors, catch the attention of prospective buyers, increase conversions, and win customer loyalty.
Each year, new trends define how m-commerce companies operate, promote in the market, and interact with their clients. In this article, we define the top mobile commerce trends that you need to be aware of in 2026.
What Is Mobile Commerce?
Mobile commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services using wireless, portable devices like tablets and smartphones.
While it overlaps with e-commerce, it’s not simply “shopping on a smaller screen.” Mobile commerce has its own batch of user expectations, technologies, and behaviors: instant browsing, frictionless payments, personalized offers, and social-driven purchasing decisions.
In 2026, mobile commerce is becoming the most influential channel for digital retail because consumers spend more time in mobile apps than on desktop websites, and they increasingly expect brands to provide a fast, intuitive mobile shopping experience anywhere and anytime.
The Forces Driving the Mobile Commerce Explosion
According to the market study, in 2023, around 30% of global shoppers used mobile commerce weekly, and in many countries, this figure exceeded. It’s easy to imagine that this number is even higher now.
Mobile devices have become the primary sources of traffic and transactions on retail websites worldwide, accounting for nearly 80% of visits and 66% of orders. So what is the reason for such rapid growth?
Accessibility and Convenience
Modern consumers don’t shop the way they did five years ago. They scroll first, search later, instantly compare prices, and expect purchases to take seconds, not minutes.
Mobile devices have become the first point of contact with a product, even if the final purchase happens elsewhere. Customers use their phones for product research, reading reviews, watching unboxing videos, checking delivery options, and comparing competitors. That means mobile shapes decisions earlier and more aggressively than any other channel.
In 2026, the brands that succeed will be the ones that optimize not only the checkout process but the entire mobile customer funnel, from discovery to purchase to post-sale support.
The Tech Boost
Mobile commerce has also benefited from quickly improving mobile infrastructure. Faster networks, way better device performance, and cloud platforms have removed many of the barriers that once made mobile shopping inconvenient.
At the same time, digital wallets and payment technologies (including blockchain & crypto) have reduced the number of steps required to complete a purchase.
Instead of manually entering card details, users can instantly pay for purchases via Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, or regional payment systems.
Market Gains
For businesses, mobile commerce isn’t growing just because customers like shopping on their phones. It’s growing because it creates faster purchase cycles and stronger customer loyalty.
Mobile devices allow brands to stay present throughout the day, turning casual browsing moments into real transactions.
What makes mobile especially powerful is how easily it supports repeat buying behavior. A customer doesn’t need to “return to your store” in the traditional sense; they simply tap an app icon, open a saved cart, or respond to a push notification.
10 M-Commerce Trends Impacting 2026
The next decade promises to be the era of m-commerce. Here are some of the m-commerce trends we believe will prevail.
AI and AI-Based Personalization
Artificial intelligence is one of the major reasons mobile commerce keeps growing so aggressively. And the real power of AI is revealed in personalization.
Unlike traditional e-commerce, where personalization often relies on static filters or generic “best sellers” lists, AI-driven personalization takes into account a multitude of factors, such as behavior, preferences, context, browsing history, past purchases, location, and even the time of day. Taking this combination of factors, smarter systems that can:
- Predict what a customer is likely to buy next
- Offer personalized bundles
- Adjust pricing and promotions
- Recommend products based on real-time behavior
- Personalize home screens and navigation flows
The business impact is huge: better personalization improves conversion rates, increases average order value, and strengthens customer loyalty.
App-First Shopping
While mobile websites remain important for SEO and first-time visitors, shopping apps are increasingly becoming the preferred online shopping environment.
Apps offer sounder navigation, faster loading, better personalization, and features that websites can’t always match, such as biometric authentication, offline browsing, and deeper integrations with device capabilities.
For retailers, apps also provide a powerful retention tool. When a user installs an app, it becomes easier to re-engage them with personalized notifications, exclusive discounts, and loyalty programs.
One-Click Checkout
Cart abandonment remains one of the biggest pain points in e-commerce, and smartphone users abandon carts even more often when checkout feels slow or complicated.
That’s why one-click checkout is becoming one of the most impactful mobile commerce trends. Whether through saved card data, mobile wallets, or “buy now” buttons, the goal is the same: reduce checkout steps to the absolute minimum.
For businesses, this trend means more than convenience because it directly concerns conversion. Every extra field or confirmation screen can reduce the likelihood of a completed purchase.
Social Commerce: Likes into Sales
Social platforms have become marketplaces. Consumers more and more often discover products directly through influencers, brand accounts, and paid ads.
Instagram Shopping, TikTok Shop, and similar features are pushing mobile commerce into a new stage, where the “discovery moment” and the “purchase moment” occur within the same scroll session.
This trend is especially powerful for impulse purchases, fashion, beauty, and lifestyle products. But even B2B brands are starting to use social commerce style through short-form video demos and interactive product showcases.
Subscription-Driven Mobile Commerce
Mobile commerce is increasingly shifting to subscription and membership models. Instead of relying solely on one-time purchases, brands are creating recurring revenue streams through automated restocking, curated subscription boxes, premium delivery subscriptions, and exclusive in-app rewards.
This trend makes subscriptions effortless: customers can subscribe in a couple of taps, manage deliveries in-app, and update payment details instantly through digital wallets.
For businesses, subscription-based m-commerce improves retention, stabilizes revenue, and provides richer customer data for personalization. It also reduces acquisition pressure, since repeat orders happen automatically.
Multi-Channel Experience
Multi-channel retailing means selling goods across multiple online channels (e.g., a web app store, a marketplace, or social media). It is a new approach to commerce that focuses on creating a coherent user experience for customers at every touchpoint.
It is different from traditional marketing, where companies optimize individual platforms without the whole experience actually being taken into account. For instance, if you sign up through a store’s website, you would expect the same login information to work on the app.
According to a study, 73% of customers shop across multiple channels. According to Salesforce, 75% of buyers expect consistent experiences across multiple channels (web, mobile, in-person, social), while 73% of buyers will likely buy from another brand if they don’t get it.
Mobile commerce is the one channel that stays with a customer wherever they go. According to a survey from TD Bank, 6 in 10 US internet users have used digital tools to compare product prices while shopping in-store. Moreover, nearly half of the respondents shared pictures of products to get feedback from family and friends.
Mobile App Payments
The number of customers who use their mobile devices to shop online is constantly growing. This leads to a decline in paying for goods with physical cards.
Instead of asking buyers to enter a string of numbers and an expiration date, you can let customers check out using one of the popular mobile payment platforms, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
While you certainly need to have a mobile-friendly website, it isn’t enough to make your business thrive. For starters, 85% of customers prefer mobile apps to mobile-optimized websites. Secondly, mobile apps have continued to convert at much higher rates than mobile web experiences.
Apps are definitely the future of m-commerce growth. Every online store must have a mobile app in 2026 to stay on top of the competition. However, if you wait too long to make this decision, you’ll quickly lag behind your competitors.
AR & VR
The key advantage of brick-and-mortar is that they provide an opportunity to see and touch products up close and try them on. Conversely, one of the major benefits of e-commerce development is the possibility to quickly ship orders, try them in the comfort of your own home, and return them easily.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality help retailers bridge the gap by “augmenting” real-world images and environments in real-time with digital information.
Smartphones and tablets are the perfect instruments for delivering an augmented reality experience. They’re portable, they’re equipped with high-definition cameras and increasingly powerful processors, and everyone has one.
For instance, a company that sells furniture online can use AR to demonstrate what a sofa would look like in a buyer’s home. This allows the buyer to select a color to see if a product will actually fit in the desired space.
Check out this infographic and learn how online retailers can benefit from Augmented reality.
AR is a great option for online commerce. Without AR and VR-powered mobile apps, consumers would have to make purchases with trial and error, which is never flawless. The last thing anyone wants to do is buy a product online only to find out it doesn’t match their expectations.
Voice Search
Initially, mobile phones were created for better voice communication. Now, given that the majority of online traffic comes from mobile phones, they are playing the main role in fostering voice-empowered activities like shopping.
In the coming years, voice search will penetrate the m-commerce market. Statistics show that 51% of consumers use voice commands to research products, while 22% of shoppers use voice search to make a purchase.
According to C&C Strategy Consultants, voice shopping grew to a whopping $40 billion-plus in 2024. Provided that 40% of the adults now use mobile voice search at least once daily, this will continue to have a considerable impact on mobile commerce.
Mobile developers will aim to come up with smarter voice control shortly to allow customers to dictate with their voice what they want:
- Search for items
- Choose their size, style, and color
- Add items to the basket
- And even check out
All of this will be accomplished exclusively through voice commands. Voice control, such as Siri or Alexa, is already a feature of most smartphone operating systems. However, in the future, voice control apps designed specifically for the world of mobile commerce will emerge. Voice control can make the shopping experience even more convenient for mobile users and contribute to the growth of mobile commerce.
Chatbots
Most e-commerce companies still rely on emails. They encourage customers to sign up for email newsletters and exclusive offers and promotions, and send notifications to motivate customers to purchase the items they left behind in their checkout cart.
But emails are slow and exhausting, and most likely will end up in a spam folder. That’s why merchants switch to chatbots, which can be used instead of emails.
Another benefit of chatbots is that they can automate the customer service process and provide a personalized customer experience based on all the information collected through mobile analytics.
Companies can save time and resources by automating conversations that would require an employee to respond. Instead of having employees doing repetitive tasks or answering the same questions again and again, customer relations specialists can focus on more important things.
Wrapping Up
It is clear that the future of mobile commerce is already a reality. When e-retail sites are built with mobile users in mind, m-commerce makes shopping quick and easy for shoppers while generating huge profits for your business.
It will be interesting to see how these trends will impact our everyday purchases, making them even more convenient and sustainable. For e-commerce store owners, this will also mean increased sales, leading to a mature ecosystem. Mobile commerce will certainly undergo a huge change from the current model with the emergence of new technologies and trends.