A survey from Loqate has revealed that one in three Brits will carry out safe shopping online from their smartphones at least once every seven days, although there are still some obstacles to increased m-commerce usage that retailers need to address if they want to fuel further growth.

60 per cent of respondents to the study said that they had snapped up at least one item in the past month using their portable device of choice, with those falling into the 40-54 age group being the biggest single proponents of this shopping platform.

This suggests that younger consumers are not necessarily as enamoured by mobile experiences as their marginally more mature counterparts, even if there is general interest in this pastime as an alternative to desktop and laptop-based e-commerce.

Analysts asked those questioned to pinpoint the problems that they see with m-commerce as it is today, with 45 per cent claiming that having to log into accounts before completing purchases is the biggest barrier to their increased usage of such platforms.

Close to a quarter said that they would be happy to allow shopping sites to access their location in order to automatically fill out delivery address information rather than having to enter this manually.

Ultimately, it seems like there is growing demand for good mobile shopping experiences, even if the sites that are most popular at the moment do not always deliver on this promise.

Tighter integration with built-in mobile accounts like those from Google and Apple could alleviate some of these issues, such as removing the need to sign in when shopping on a new site or returning to a regularly used retailer’s service.

While mobile devices now account for more browsing and searching than full-size PCs, the regularity with which purchases are made on them may not change rapidly unless action is taken.