While consumers did make purchases using their mobile devices on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, redeeming coupons and comparing products and prices are the top mobile commerce trends so far this holiday season, according to First Data Corp.

On Cyber Monday eBay U.S. mobile commerce sales jumped 146 percent compared to the same day last year, and eBay saw consumers shopping on mobile three times as much during the week of Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. This large increase is a testament to mobile commerce becoming even more mainstream.

Mobile Commerce Daily’s Dan Butcher interviewed Chris Wuhrer, vice president of mobile commerce solutions and channel development at First Data, Atlanta. Here is what he had to say:

What are some outstanding data points and trends related to mobile that you noticed over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Trends we have seen emerging tend to be more product comparisons using mobile, as well as special offers and incentives delivered to mobile users.

Can you gauge the impact of the various mobile channels on retail sales this year compared to last year, both in terms of actual mobile commerce transactions and driving traffic in-store?
More coupons and pricing promotions are being delivered to mobile devices. Social deals continue to climb and people are more closely monitoring their eBay bids from their mobile devices.

These are trends that are being publicized and not what First Data Corp. can necessarily identify through our own internal reporting.

What are the most used types of mobile payments?
From what we can ascertain, remote payments are being utilized.

This is simply consumers accessing mobile retail portals and executing sales using their existing mobile wallets from key online retailers such as Amazon or Best Buy.

What level of adoption are mobile gift cards seeing?
We have seen a number of new merchant applications and developer applications introduced into 2010 that support single or multiple merchant integrations.

There has been a proliferation of iPhone applications around gift card management, virtual gift card issuance and gift card management.

We anticipate a number of new applications supporting a marketplace or aggregated view into a consumers gift cards as we enter 2011.

What are your predictions for the mobile space in 2011?
1.       We will see the introduction of NFC payments from a mobile device in the U.S. in 2011

2.       Hyper-local advertising using customer purchase analytics, as well as geo-targeting capabilities to better segment and attract mobile customers

3.       Greater adoption of mobile banking, but the utilization of P2P using remote payments will still lack adoption

4.       Coupons that can be physically redeemed over POS

5.       Remote payments within physical store locations

Final Take
Dan Butcher, associate editor, Mobile Commerce Daily