It’s no secret that mobile commerce has been moving at an incredibly fast rate in recent years. Customer engagement these days tends to revolve more and more around mobile devices.
“Mobile commerce is definitely a reality this holiday season,” Haresh Kumar, VP Marketing, Moovweb explained to Loyalty360. “Consumer behavior shifted from mostly searching and browsing on mobile to making purchases on mobile at a much higher rate at all hours.”
According to Moovweb’s 2015 Mobile Holiday Shopping report, which tracked key ecommerce metrics during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, yielded surprising insights into the latest mobile holiday shopping trends as consumers increasingly made purchases via their smartphones, signaling a fundamental shift in consumers’ buying habits.
Some key insights from the report include:
More customers shopped using their mobile phones than last year. In fact, mobile usage grew at an astounding rate of about 4.5 times higher than last year.
Shoppers binged on mobile phones during Black Friday, resulting in over 95% YOY mobile revenue increase. The vast majority of mobile consumers were also iPhone users. Additionally, tablet
s usage saw a 16% drop in YOY share of sessions resulting in a 9% decrease in revenue for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Shoppers relied on their smartphones to an even greater degree than last year for their Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping. Thanksgiving’s contribution to revenue compared to Black Friday was 5% higher this year. Black Friday still dominated, but Thanksgiving drove nearly the same percentage of revenue over the two-day period as Black Friday.
So what does this mean as the holiday season moves full steam ahead?
“The ‘mobile mind shift’ is here,” Kumar said. “Customers expect to get what they want in their immediate context and moments of need. These mobile moments represent unprecedented opportunities for companies to engage their customers.”
Some of the surprising insights, according to Kumar, include:
A little over a quarter of all revenue from purchases came from smartphones and tablets (18% from phones; 10% from tablets. That’s an 81% increase over Cyber Week last year.
Black Friday was the big winner in terms of mobile revenue, with an increase of 95% over last year.
The vast majority of mobile consumers were iPhone users.
Overall conversions on smartphones were 1.98% across the 30 retailers.
“It’s clear that mobile shopping will eclipse the desktop number sooner than we had imagined,” Kumar said. “Ecommerce is evolving at a rapid pace, and with the holiday season in full gear, marketers have found that they need to adapt to a dynamic ecommerce landscape in order to connect with consumers as they shop in store, online and via mobile interchangeably.”