Mobile commerce applications perform well on Thanksgiving and Black Friday

Mobile commerce report shows increase in mobile app use

By now, it is no secret that mobile commerce had a strong showing during the Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping weekend. A multitude of retailers put intense focus on mobile consumers this year in the hopes of engaging these people in various mobile commerce platforms. Onavo, a mobile data compression firm, has released information concerning which of these platforms performed the best during the shopping weekend. The company tracked the performance of these platforms that were put to use by some of the largest retailers in the world.

Report shows Best Buy saw greatest increase in mobile commerce traffic this year

According to Onavo, Groupon remained the most used mobile commerce application during the holiday shopping weekend. Best Buy, however, saw the largest increase in overall commerce on Black Friday. Use of the company’s mobile commerce application shot up by almost 600% on a single day. The Best Buy application was followed closely by one from Wal-Mart. A mobile commerce application from Kohl’s saw an increase in use of over 300% on the same day.

Report accounts for iOS platform only

Notably, Onavo’s report accounts only for iPhone users, thus physical payments made with a mobile device are not represented. The Android platform is currently the only mainstream mobile operating system that supports NFC technology, which facilitates mobile payments for physical products. The report also does not account for the mobile commerce activity that came from consumers with Android devices. These consumers are estimated to have accounted for a major portion of overall mobile commerce activity during the holiday shopping weekend.

Consumers continue to become more comfortable with mobile commerce

Mobile commerce continues to grow in popularity amongst consumers. Retailers have been working to raise the awareness of mobile commerce for several months, hoping to engage a relatively new audience of tech-savvy consumers. These efforts seem to have paid off and may have established a foundation upon which retailers can build more engaging mobile commerce venture for the future.