Black Friday and Cyber Monday are always high-grossing days for online and brick-and-mortar retailers. But with the explosion of mobile shopping, payment and deals apps, merchants are expected to see high shopping volumes on other days, too. In fact, according to PayPal, this “couch commerce” is expected to drive a record holiday season:

• Atlanta, according to CityBizList.com is the #3 mobile shopping savvy city in the U.S
• PayPal has reported $10M in mobile payments daily, possibly tripling volume over 2010
• Google has shown 200% growth in mobile product search & its Shopper app downloads
• Shoppers owning both a smartphone & tablet are 63% likelier to spend more via mobile

While product search continues to drive mobile use, apps from providers like eBay, PayPal and Shopkick are increasing retail conversions in a variety of ways, from sending rewards points to users when they walk in a store, to enabling users to pay for purchases on their mobile device.

So what can retailers do to capitalize on the trend and offer the best mobile shopping experience? Offering a secure platform, a clear mobile device policy, and various authentication, encryption and security controls is number one:

• There will be an estimated 120,000 malware apps by 2020, versus 2,500 in 2010
• Users are 30% likelier to click on an unsafe link on mobile devices
• Mobile users are 3 times more likely to give log-in information to phishing sites

Next is optimizing a mobile version of your website, knowing which key functions and apps to leverage to ensure fast, easy mobile access for customers and increased conversions for you. Finally, always keep ahead of mobile trends when planning your m-commerce strategy—such as Adobe’s announcement that it will no longer offer Flash for mobile browsers —so there are no hiccups when it’s time to launch.