Digital retail giant Amazon has quietly indicated that it will end its PayPhrase program.

If you’re unfamiliar with PayPhrase, Amazon had previously launched the program as a means for further simplifying the online shopping experience.

Not yet three years old, PayPhrase allowed shoppers to check out by simply using a personal phrase followed by a four-digit pin.

Amazon says on its website that the time has come to move on from PayPhrase.

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Shopify, a venerable name in digital commerce, announced Wednesday that it has acquired mobile app development firm Select Start Studios (S3).

According to Shopify, the reason for the acquisition is to help the company carry out an aggressive mobile growth strategy.

The acquisition marks Shopify’s first major investment since raising $15 million in Series B funding last October.

Having helped to build some of today’s biggest online stores, Shopify can presently boast of 20,000 active online stores in 80 different countries.

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On January 9th, Mobile Marketing Watch reported that PayPal and Home Depot are teaming to experiment with mobile wallet services at select Home Depot stores.

The trial testing allows shoppers to purchase items at checkout either directly through their mobile device or through a special PayPal card.

On Monday, it was reported that the number of “select stores” is expanding… to all of them.

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2012 is less than a month old, and yet we’ve already seen no shortage of major mCommerce and NFC-related announcements out of the tech world in this new year.

Today, that trend continues, as ViVOtech – the near field communication (NFC) software and systems company – raised the curtain on ViVOtouch, a mobile marketing software platform.

According to details provided in the announcement, the platorm in question “enables retailers to deliver personalized content, offers and loyalty programs to customers, while enabling interactive shopping experiences with NFC-enabled mobile devices – all in real-time.”

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With mobile commerce taking off to an unprecedented degree at the onset of 2012, leading retailers and other top ecommerce platforms are going out of their way to make sure their loyalists have the best shopping experience possible.

According to the latest insight provided by research firm ForeSee, Apple’s mobile shopping satisfaction score puts the Cupertino, California-based tech giant on the top tier of players in mCommerce.

An impressive 85% of 3,000 consumers surveyed rank Apple at the top of their favorite companies to shop from online. Incredibly, Apple’s mobile shopping score was even higher than consumers’ overall satisfaction with Apple’s web store, which has an 83% approval rating.

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eBay itself won the bidding war for most media attention today on the heels of eBay CEO John Donahoe proclaiming his company to be a mobile commerce leader during his keynote at the CEA Leaders in Technology dinner at CES.

Donahoe revealed that eBay reached $5 billion in mobile GMV and PayPal reached $4 billion in mobile payment volume in 2011.

More than 890,000 new eBay shoppers made their first eBay purchase through the company’s mobile apps in 2011, a 113% increase year over year.

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On Wednesday, Millennial Media published its new S.M.A.R.T. Report, which is serving up no shortage of interesting insights into the contemporary mobile ad landscape.

According to Millennial Media’s findings, mCommerce in November grew an impressive 64 percent month over-month as a Post-Click action.

Meanwhile, 68% of telecom campaigns utilized mCommerce as a Post-Click Campaign Action in November. As it turns out, telecom advertisers led other advertisers in leveraging mCommerce, allowing customers to purchase new devices, accessories, or service plans via their mobile devices.

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