Tag: ibm

New report shows that holiday shopping weekend was a great time for mobile commerce

IBM has released its latest Digital Analytics Benchmark report, which highlights the performance of mobile commerce over the holiday shopping weekend. From Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, consumers flocked to mobile shopping sites looking for special deals on products that they are interested in. They made use of the mobile services that retail offered during the shopping weekend. This lead to a surge in mobile payments and online shopping in general, according to IBM.

Mobile sales increased by 27.2% this year during the shopping weekend

The report shows that online sales during the holiday shopping weekend increased by 12.6% over what they had been during the same period last year. Mobile sales grew by 27.2%, suggesting that more people opted to spend money through their mobile devices rather than visit physical stores. Some retail stores support mobile payments as well, which some consumers chose to make use of while shopping. The majority of mobile consumers appear to favor shopping online from their mobile device rather than making a payment at a physical store.

Tablet users spent more money online than smartphone users

IBM’s report shows that smartphones lead the way in terms of online traffic. Approximately 28% of all online traffic to retail sites on Cyber Monday came from smartphones, while tablets accounted for 12% of all online traffic. Tablets were able to handle retail websites better than smartphones, however, with tablets accounting for 12.9% of all online sales made from a mobile device. Tablet users were more likely to spend money than smartphone users and would purchase products more frequently.

Some retailers continue to struggle with engaging mobile consumers

The holiday shopping weekend has shown that mobile commerce is a powerful force in the retail sector. Over the past few years, more retailers have been working to engage mobile consumers more effectively. Some have managed to find significant success in this endeavor, while others have failed to connect with mobile consumers, either because of poor services provided or their lack of a mobile website.

According to the real time analytics that were recorded by IBM, this year’s shopping trends greatly beat out 2013.

On Thanksgiving Day, the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season, family members assembled to enjoy each other’s company, to watch football, to eat a wonderful feast, but when it was all over, they looked to mobile commerce to look for great deals.

The real time analytics from IBM for Thanksgiving Day showed online sales spiked 14.3 percent over the same day last year.

Mobile traffic made up a massive 52.1 percent of all online traffic on Thanksgiving Day, this year. This means that the figure rose by 22.4 percent when compared to that same day in 2013. When looking more specifically at the shopping side of mobile commerce, IBM found that of all online sales, those made over smartphones and tablets accounted for 32.3 percent. This was higher than last year’s figure by more than a quarter, as it represented an increase of 25.4 percent.

This success in mobile commerce on that day was explained by a number of different factors.

Those contributors included the following:

• Consumers were eager to discover great online bargains, even when the stores were closed. The average order value (AOV) was 1.8 percent lower than it was last year, at $125.25. That said, those shoppers were buying an average of 4.3 items per order, which was an increase of 16.2 percent. This suggests that people were actually buying more, but they have become more savvy when it comes to finding ways to save such as through the use of online rebates and coupons.
• Smartphones were being used to browse for products, but mobile purchases were made over tablets and many still looked to their laptops and desktops. Smartphones may have driven 36.4 percent of the total online traffic (over double that of tablets, which represented 15.4 percent of online traffic), but sales over tablets made up 17.9 percent of the total and smartphones made up only 14.4 percent of the total. Desktops still reigned supreme over mobile commerce at 67.6 percent of the online sales total.