Smartphones and tablets made up 37 percent of the traffic on shopping sites that day.
After a powerful push made over Thanksgiving, online spending and sales on Black Friday increased by 9 percent when compared to the same day last year, and 37 percent of that traffic came from holiday mobile commerce users.
The Benchmark real time reporting unit at IBM has released its data from that day.
The data covered 800 online retailers and took millions of different transactions into account. It examined the trends regarding online purchasing, including the holiday mobile commerce sales. When compared to 2012, all of the numbers were looking quite good, having increased over their previous figures. The average order value that was experienced on that date, for example, was $142.33. This was very promising for retailers who saw an average order value of $127.59 online on Thanksgiving, just a day before.
Holiday mobile commerce sales are playing an ever increasing role in those totals.
The shopping that has been occurring over smartphones and tablets has been steadily rising over the last year. This was made quite clear on Black Friday, when 37 percent of all online traffic came from these devices. When compared to the same date in 2012, this was an increase of a full percentage point. The sales that were made over these devices also remained strong, having represented 21 percent of all online sales.
Smartphones were much bigger players in online shopping than tablets, this year. They drove 24.5 percent of all of the traffic online, which was just a sliver over twice the contribution of tablets. Those latter gadgets drove 12.2 percent of the traffic. This makes it clear that at the moment smartphones are clearly the browsing device that people enjoy the most in the mobile sphere.
Equally, tablets owners made notably larger orders than smartphone owners. The average purchase made over a tablet came to $137.55. On the other hand, the average smartphone based holiday mobile commerce order came to $118.33. This indicates that shoppers will purchase more items or larger ticket items when they are working with a larger screen.
According to a recent comScore report, online shopping this year will be bright for smartphones and tablets.
comScore has, once again, released its predictions for the holiday shopping season, and for its predictions of 2013, it has pointed out that mobile commerce is going to have a very bright opportunity, particularly on Cyber Monday.
Although there is a shorter season this year, when compared to last year, the decline should be only “slight”.
Although many have wondered if the fact that there is nearly a week – 6 days – less this shopping season from this Thanksgiving to Christmas, when compared to last year, comScore believes that there will be only a “slight decline” in the overall growth rate that will be experienced in a typical year. Moreover, it has predicted that when compared to the powerful sales that are experienced over mobile commerce and online shopping, this decline will even be noticeable.
Once mobile commerce has weighed in, it is likely that the year over year growth will be 14 to 17 percent.
comScore’s predictions have shown that this will allow mobile commerce to reach its highest percentage ever achieved out of the total online shopping, this year. The figures that they are predicting are that smartphone and tablet based sales will represent 12 to 13 percent of online shopping, and that the spending will near $10 billion for the last quarter of this year.
Mobile commerce has already reached record high percentages of total online spending within the last three quarters of the fiscal year, this year. It is being anticipated that this trend will keep up for the remainder of 2013 and that it will leap beyond last year’s total digital commerce spending, which was 11.3 percent.
According to the report from comScore, “We have seen that in periods of concentrated consumer activity, a greater number of people are likely to engage in emerging behaviors, such as mobile commerce.” Taking into consideration the fact that this short shopping season has six fewer days than it did last year, the analytics firm has predicted that purchasing will be far more concentrated and will therefore expand the need for tools such as smartphone and tablet based shopping.