Four of Five Smartphone Users Go Shopping (AMZN, EBAY, AAPL, WMT, TGT, BBY)

The number of U.S. smartphone owners who use either their mobile browser or a dedicated app to visit a retail site totaled 89.5 million in July, representing about 4 out of every 5 smartphone owners in the country. The data comes from the latest survey of smartphone users by comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR).

The leading sites for retail visits belong to Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) with 49.64 million unique visitors and eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) with 32.58 million unique visitors. The next four retailers are all multi-channel sellers, with both brick-and-mortar locations as well as popular websites. These are, in order, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) with 17.68 million unique visitors, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) with 16.3 million unique visitors, Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) with 10.04 million unique visitors, and Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY) with 7.18 million unique visitors.

Women spend more time on retail sites than do men, whether on a desktop or a mobile device. Perhaps surprisingly, women account for 56.1% of time spent from mobile devices compared with 53.4% of time spent from desktops/laptops.

Assuming that unique visitors to comScore’s top ten websites for July includes smartphone users, the numbers are pretty startling. Amazon sites grabbed 104 million unique visitors in July. Of those, nearly half of unique visitors were using their smartphones to view Amazon’s products. Walmart’s web site had 45.23 million unique visitors in July, of which more than a third used smartphones. Nearly half of Target’s web site visits came from smartphone users.

I don’t know about you, but I think the ground is shifting.

Paul Ausick