Asia is leading the way for mobile-based shopping over physical stores, with quite a push from the millennial market, for whom mobile shopping seems to hold special appeal, according to a regional Twitter executive.

Martyn U’ren, Twitter’s head of research in Asia Pacific and MENA, addressed this topic at the recent Money 20/20 conference in Singapore, where he noted that Asia is home to half the world’s millennial population, a demographic that is increasingly using mobile payments to buy anything and everything online.

Twitter’s recent Mcomm 2.0 study, which surveyed 7,500 respondents across 15 markets, found that 42% of Asian millennials are mobile shopping exclusively, compared to 27.2% of older generations.

And when asked about platform preferences for online purchases across categories, the research found that Asian millennials tipped 12 out of the 16 categories – including clothes, cosmetics, flights, hotels and even money transfer – to be mobile-centric categories for them.

“Asian millennials are very much more comfortable [than their western counterparts] using their mobile for a huge range of services,” said U’ren. (For more, read WARC’s report: Mobile commerce and Asia’s millennials: a match made in retail heaven.)

And he believes they will also lead the charge into new and, up to now, unlikely areas for mobile commerce as the combination of mobile and AR opens up new horizons in retail.

“We always thought that nobody would be able to buy a sofa or a large household item using their mobile,” said U’ren. “Technology has just moved through that. All of a sudden, there’s going to be great disruption in the area. There is a great opportunity to move things out, from this part of the world.”

Sourced from WARC