Groupon continues its evolution in the daily deal space, this week with the formal launch of Groupon Rewards nationwide.

Billed as a user friendly loyalty program for merchants, Groupon Rewards offers customers special “rewards” in return for their shopping loyalty.

After a successful pilot program in Philadelphia, Groupon Rewards is now open to U.S. merchants, regardless of whether or not the business has previously run a Groupon deal.

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This week, a new infographic sponsored by Mobile+Positive and Luth Research was published to great interest across the blogosphere.

The infographic and its underlying report provide a fascinating look at how well Walmart, Target, Sears and Kohls have performed in Apple’s App Store.

The data is based on the Luth Traffic Index, which is an estimate of the total downloads an app has received over its entire lifespan. It is based on statistical analysis of comments, ratings, price, category and date of last release of each app in the iTunes and Android Marketplace.

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Bloomberg is reporting Tuesday morning that Amazon is testing a service that will allow tablet users to make purchases through mobile applications.

This is the latest clue that the online retail giant wants to step up competition with the likes of Google and Apple, two companies for which in-app purchases are old hat.

Sources familiar with the development say the service being tested allows both subscriptions and purchases of individual items within apps.

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The following is a guest post from Jim Wehmann, senior vice president of global marketing for Digital River.

Mobile commerce continues to generate a lot of buzz among online marketers. It holds out the promise of sizable incremental sales as tablet and mobile smartphone shipments continue to soar. Smartphone sales in 2012 are expected to be nearly 1.8 billion units, while tablet unit sales are expected to climb to nearly 100 million. Mobile commerce in the hands of this many consumers is a very exciting prospect. And it speaks to the very core of direct marketing – go where your customers are rather than waiting for them to come to you. Mobile commerce will truly enable consumers to purchase anytime, anywhere – on the commuter train, at the pool, at the game and everywhere else on the go.

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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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While Black Friday brought a flurry of shoppers to retail stores, it also brought a flurry of barcode scans according to NeoMedia.

The company saw a dramatic increase of more than 240% in mobile barcode scans via its app on Black Friday compared to last year, including a 13% jump in 2D scans over 1D.  Looking deeper at the most popular types of barcodes being scanned, 2D is the front-runner by far with roughly 87% versus just 13% for 1D.  In 2010 for comparison, 74% of scans were 2D versus 26% for 1D codes.

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Mobile shopping is poised to reach the zenith of its popularity and usage so far this holiday shopping season.

A new study from Wakefield Research (which was commissioned by Motricity) shows that 70% of device-shoppers made more purchases in 2011 than they did in 2010 from their smartphone or tablet.

The study confirms that this holiday season may be the biggest year for online holiday shopping yet.

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