Retailer mobile commerce accelerating - WSJ

As Apple Inc. unveils its new iPhone, more retailers—from Home Depot Inc. to Lilly Pulitzer—are looking to generate new sales by making it easier for people to shop via cellphones.

Mobile e-commerce is a small but high-growth area in retail. Shoppers will order $2.2 billion of physical goods from websites via cellphones this year, $1 billion more than last year and five times more than 2008, projects ABI Research Inc., a New York technology research firm.

"I think within two or three years a material percentage of our site visits and online revenues will come through mobile phones," said Hal Lawton, president of Homedepot.com. By 2014, he expects perhaps 30% to 40% of Homedepot.com traffic to come from mobile phones.

By May, 5% of Armani Exchange's e-commerce sales came from mobile phones, and June is trending near 6%, the company said. "We've had some pretty fantastic growth with it," said Harlan Bratcher, chief executive of Armani Exchange, which is the youngest and most casual of the Giorgio Armani brands. Mr. Bratcher said mobile appealed to him because it is the way his customers—who typically are 18 to 25 years old in urban areas—prefer to communicate.

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