‘Tis the season for retail market analysis, and Monetate, a leading firm specializing in brand personalization, has jumped into the winter fray with its own findings connected to retail consumer behavior during the busiest shopping period of the year. Based on more than 100 million data points gathered from consumers across multiple channels, the research seeks to mine actionable insight from the chaotic shopping environment of Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
According to the company’s findings, the channel of choice for shoppers across the country continues to shift away from what was once accepted as the norm. With Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping accounting for about 30 percent of an average shopper’s $588.90 total spent on gifts, the channels through which these purchases are made become a crucial factor in predicting behavior going forward.
Black Friday, especially, saw a dip in the traditional desktop shopping, seeing conversion falling by 36 percent compared to last year’s data. Where are these customers going? In short, they’re heading to mobile channels. Conversion rates on mobile are up 38 percent on Black Friday and, in the most impressive finding of all, have more than doubled the Thanksgiving conversion rate, up 116 percent total.
While Average Order Value has gone up, conversion rates are down overall, suggesting that shoppers are spending far more money on a fewer number of items. This theory is further backed by increasing bounce rates, up 2.8 percent and 7 percent on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, respectively. This bounce rate likely reflects the increasing demand for personalization and seamless CX, leaving sites in the dust when they don’t offer this kind of experience to holiday shoppers.
“Gone are the days of rushing from the Thanksgiving dinner table into crowded stores in order to stock up on gifts. In fact, for the first time, conversion rates across all channels were higher on Thanksgiving than Black Friday (3.75 percent vs. 3.04 percent). Clearly, e-commerce has not only arrived but is now the channel of choice for holiday buyers,” said Lucinda Duncalfe, CEO, Monetate. “But it is not just consumers who benefit from the ease of shopping at whatever time on whichever device. Retailers now have the ability to use deep data to enrich and personalize the customer experience, which in turn leads to greater sales and increased loyalty.”