Mobile e-commerce grows while acquiring shoppers gets pricier, Adjust report shows

Adjust's fresh Shopping App Insights Report captured a two-sided picture of mobile commerce: the market grows, but every new shopper costs more. Shopping app sessions rose 15% year over year, installs 2%. Meanwhile the ratio of paid to organic installs reached 0.72 — 26% above last year and 47% above the level of two years ago: competition for user attention has sharpened markedly.

The marketplace cut is telling: they take only 18% of installs, but retention is better — 19% of users return the next day against an average 13%, and sessions run almost five minutes longer. The most forward-looking part concerns AI: visits to retailer websites after interacting with AI assistants tripled. Adjust's advice is unusually candid: do not build your own shopping agent — make your commerce legible to other people's AI agents through machine-readable catalogs, stable product URLs and universal protocols.

For Kazakh e-commerce, where ecosystem players already retain users best, the conclusions are direct: track your paid-to-organic ratio, invest in retention, and prepare product cards so both humans and algorithms read them without errors. A leader benefits from seeing these metrics regularly rather than at quarter end — in 1Cifer, an agent compiles such digests from company data for the executive on a schedule, by itself.