3.4 million Australians used an mobile commerce service in December last year to conduct banking or to pay bills, buy goods and services with their phones, the Australian Communications and Media Authority said today.

Only 620,000 transactions were recorded in 2010, which represents a growth rate of 448%.

The total volume of Australian purchases made via mobile devices jumped 30% last year, reaching A$4.9 billion, a figure on par with the total for the United States.

ACMA said his huge growth in the use of m-commerce is enabled by a number of key developments, including increases in the:

• take-up of smartphones—12.07 million people owned a smartphone at May 2014, an increase of 8% since May 2013.
• use of the internet over mobile phones—this has grown by 196 per cent in three years, with 8.3 million active users during December 2013 compared to 2.8 million during December 2010
• availability and use of mobile phone banking and shopping applications—8.9 million Australians with an internet-enabled mobile phone downloaded a mobile app in the six months to May 2013, with 4.3 million downloading a banking and finance app and 2.9 million downloading a shopping app.
• availability of 3G and increasing rollout of 4G mobile phone networks—3G networks covered 94–99% and 4G networks covered at least 66% of the Australian population at June 2013, with further coverage underway.

But despite the rapid increase in mobile transactions, people still use desktop and laptop personal computers as their main method to transact online, ACMA said,

M-commerce accounted for 27% of all online shopping in 2013.

There was a gap of between 25 and 27% of Australians that are comfortable conducting online banking and shopping on a desktop or laptop rather than a mobile device.

ACMA noted it was increasingly common for Australians to own three or more digital devices, but it only considered desktops, laptops and mobile phones and excluded tablets from the study.

Mobile internet use jumped almost two-fold in the three years to December 2013, with 8.3 million active users at the end of last year. ACMA said that in the six months to May 2013, 4.3 million downloaded a finance app, and 2.9 million people downloaded an app from a retailer.

The research was conducted by Roy Morgan Research, based on a sample size of 1253 users in December 2013.