This I did not see coming. Not so much that the predominant platform that eBay Australia sees its mobile commerce through would be iOS; the iPhone and iPad’s market position make that pretty much inevitable. But WAP coming in just behind iOS? Did we skip back to 1998 and nobody told me?
Update: It seems not; eBay’s just contacted me to clarify their mistake.
eBay Australia’s released a bunch of interesting stats today about its smartphone users. A brief rundown; we buy fashion, technology and home & garden products through our phones, buying on average one item every four seconds in Australia in 2011. Somebody bought a Mercedes Benz SL350 via eBay for $50,989, making it the most expensive phone purchase. In terms of biggest spenders by location, Melbourne takes the crown, followed by Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle, Gold Coast, Wollongong, Gosford, Canberra and the Sunshine Coast. Which makes me wonder; what’s all that mining money in Perth being spent on that they didn’t make the top ten?
Still, it was the statistics on the top five platforms for accessing mobile eBay that really got my attention. How many WAP users are there out there any more? Or are eBay counting lots of random browsers as WAP because they flat out don’t know?
Update: No, it seems like it’s not so much that they don’t know as that somebody made a mistake in sending out both the release and the graph; WAP apparently refers to mobile browsers; everybody else in the graph is using a specific eBay shopping app. We can rest easy; WAP’s still dead and buried.