Ebay Beat Groupon, LivingSocial in Mobile Shopping App Race

Ebay and Amazon are beating social commerce platforms like Groupon and LivingSocial in the mobile shopping app contest. According to Nielsen, eBay Mobile – which allows shoppers to take photos of items to list for sale and notifies them of auctions and watched item status – attracted 13.2 million users in June. That’s an increase of 31 percent since January 2012, according to Nielsen data provided to ClickZ.

Those eBay users spent more than an hour with the mobile app in June, far more time than all but one of the other apps in the top 10 list. The only app that beat eBay in time spent was mobile shopping rewards app Shopkick, which boasts a whopping three hours and 19 minutes in average time spent in June. Still, the Shopkick app user base is only around half that of the top three shopping apps – 6.5 million uniques.

Amazon Mobile and Groupon round out the top three shopping apps by unique audience in June. Interesting to note is the growth rates of the apps. While eBay grew 31 percent since January and Amazon rose 35 percent to 12.1 million, Groupon’s unique audience grew only 10 percent according to Nielsen, reaching just under 12 million unique users.

According to Nielsen, 47 percent of smartphone owners in the U.S. used shopping apps in June, accessing them 17 times on average in that month.

A recent study from shopper marketing agency Ryan Partnership showed 32 percent of 8,000 primary household shoppers surveyed said they buy products and brands they never bought before when using shopping apps. Nineteen percent said the same of mobile coupons. The Ryan Digital Retail Study 2012 also found 40 percent said using shopping apps influenced their choice of stores.

Chart provided by Ryan Partnership

“Shopping Apps and retailer tools are [the] strongest drivers of unplanned purchasing. For brands that are not on the shopper’s list, it is at least as important to be a part of the retailer’s digital tools as their traditional tools,” noted Ryan in the study.

The only two brick-and-mortar retail brands that made it on the top 10 list for June were Walgreens and Target. Walgreens had 2.8 million users who spent around eight minutes during the month on average. Target had 2.2 million who spend just under eight minutes.