Tag: mcommerce

The retail giant has moved its Cyber Monday sale to the day after Thanksgiving to keep competitive.

Walmart has announced that its Black Friday mobile commerce will be the new Cyber Monday this year. The move was taken to help to avoid a detrimental shopping lull over the weekend after Thanksgiving.

Instead of making people wait for online sales, Walmart is evening out the in-store and mobile experience.

Many have speculated that dragging out Black Friday mobile commerce is a move to compete with Amazon. That online marketplace has offered stiff competition to Walmart. As Amazon operates exclusively online, it has had a considerable advantage over this vital holiday shopping long weekend.

Shoppers are now eyeing the retailer to find out precisely what the deals will be. This isn’t the first time Walmart moved online and mobile commerce ahead from Cyber Monday. Last year, its online sales were launched on a Cyber Sunday instead. Promotions began at 6pm that evening and carried over into the next day.

This Black Friday mobile commerce sale will also reveal a range of new Walmart online shopping features.

This holiday shopping season will also represent the first real test to Walmart’s massive online overhaul. It has made widespread changes to its standard website as well as its mobile shopping experience and app. Moreover, it has a considerably larger number of items available for sale online. Reportedly, this includes approximately 23 million items. Last year at this time, that figure was 8 million items.

A sizeable portion of that increase is due to the rising number of marketplace sellers. There are around 3,000 marketplace sellers on Walmart.com at the moment. This means that shoppers will be able to purchase items on the website beyond what they’d even find in stores.

Recently, Walmart reported that its online and mobile commerce sales had increased by 20.6 percent. It would be safe to say that its website overhaul played a notable role in that growth. This is particularly true as this year’s first fiscal quarter saw only 7 percent growth.

Now, Walmart is looking to Black Friday mobile commerce to up the ante from last year’s holiday season price war.

The Chinese mega-giant company has worked hard to broaden its global reach this year.

Singles Day mobile commerce predictions continue to roll in as the big day approaches on November 11. Alibaba has made tremendous efforts to help to bolster its own successes on this unique Chinese day. At the same time, it is hoping to encourage a growing number of consumers to participate.

That said, most analytics firms have agreed that the participation in Singles Day 2016 should break records.

Millions of people have already been making Singles Day mobile commerce purchases. Alibaba’s CEO, Jack Ma, is hoping to be able to use this m-commerce trend to achieve greater results outside of China, as well. Though Singles Day was invented in China and is celebrated primarily there, Alibaba is looking to use it as a jumping off point.

November 11 is Veterans day in the United States. This makes it unlikely to be a great date to try to carry Singles Day over to this part of the world. That said, the company is hoping to keep the shopping momentum going in the US as the holiday season follows closely on its heels.

Singles Day mobile commerce is a more recent phenomenon that started over desktop in 1993.

The day was created by a group of male Nanjing University students. They decided that 11/11 was the perfect numerical date to represent a celebration of being single. Though it had a slow start and was limited to a small local movement over e-commerce, Alibaba made it big. The company decided to take hold of the movement, which saw growing popularity, and monetize it.

By 2009, the company’s massive e-commerce platforms, Taobao and Tmall, were raking in cash through online purchases. The first Singles Day observance brought an estimated $7 million in sales. Even in a market the size of China, that figure is impressive, though not at all tremendous. By 2010, far more retaielers were on board, including one of the main rivals of Alibaba in China, JD.com.

The next year, Alibaba alone generated $820 million in sales. By last year, that figure had risen to $9.3 billion, credited greatly to Singles Day mobile commerce trends. Since 2012 the sales have been greater than those seen on Cyber Monday in the United States and it is expected that they will be even higher this year.