Just to tip our hand on where our long term thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if people could buy tours, book hotels, plays or theatres, and make reservations within a single app as a single basket transaction.

Here’s an interesting report – Smartphone Owners Now Spending More from Handset, but Poor Site Functionality Is a Turn-off (all emphasis added by us):

Key findings from Compete’s Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey include:

• 37 percent of smartphone owners have purchased something non-mobile with their handset in the past 6 months.
• 19 percent of total smartphone owners have purchased music from their device, 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
• The most popular mobile shopping-related activities are still research related – 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users are most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones while they are shopping.
• The second most likely activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners investigating reviews from their handset before they purchase.

While m-commerce is poised for explosive growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of e-commerce. Compete’s Q3 Smartphone Intelligence survey found that eight percent of smartphone owners that tried to purchase a product on their device were unable to do so. 45 percent of those that abandoned the process reported that they did so because the site would not load, and an additional 38 percent left the site because it was not developed specifically for smartphone users.

That is grim and probably totally unnecessary – purchasing products from your mobile tourism product should be as simple as buying music in iTunes. If you’re doing something interesting in this space, we’d like to hear from you.

Link via David Eads.