Tag: mobile holiday shopping season

The holiday shopping season has allowed the channel to become a standard form of comparison and purchasing.

The rapidly growing m-commerce trends of browsing, comparing, and actually buying on smartphones and tablets aren’t just a little piece of the fringe, anymore, but are starting to officially become mainstream.

Holiday shoppers, this year, have shown that even when they don’t make purchases, they use their devices.

Many analysts have been looking directly toward the purchasing data to determine whether or not m-commerce trends have been pointing toward the mainstream. However, when that data is considered, while there has been massive year over year growth, it still represents only a sliver of the total online purchases and even less of the buying as a whole. When the definition of mobile shopping is broadened, it soon becomes clear that purchasing is only one of several behaviors for which shoppers use their smartphones and tablets.

These m-commerce trends are important to recognize as they are often deciding factors for online and in store purchases.

That said, even without taking the browsing, price comparisons, receipt of advertising and discount coupons, and other activities into account, there has still been a great deal of growth, so far, over the holiday shopping season when it comes to mobile commerce purchases. But it seems to be in those “process” activities on the way to actually buying that small screens truly shine. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that almost 40 percent of all of the online traffic on Black Friday and almost a third of all online traffic on Cyber Monday was from smartphones and tablets.

Even though this did not represent the purchases being made, it shows that people are using their smartphones and tablets to visit websites and to look at companies, products, and prices. Because the devices are always with their owners, they are automatically using them, first, to perform quick searches, to locate nearby businesses, to find out whether or not the item that they want is in stock, and to discover the best possible price.

Three years ago, only 4 percent of Cyber Monday’s online traffic came from mobile. This makes it clear that m-commerce trends are headed toward – if they have not already achieved – mainstream status.

According to a recent Shopgate report, retail needs to appeal to smartphone using consumers.

Shopgate, a highly recognized m-commerce business solution, has released a report called the “2013 Holiday Guide for Online Retailers”, which provided the top 10 recommendations for success, this holiday season.

Among those points, the focus on catering to smartphone users was a considerable one.

What was explained by Shopgate in its report was that retailers should start acting right away to make their way into m-commerce if they haven’t already prepared their strategy for the upcoming holiday shopping season. It is no longer enough to focus on online shopping in general and as a whole. Instead, a focus also needs to be placed specifically on the mobile channel.

In fact, when it came to getting into m-commerce, the recommendation was “do it now!”

The report from Shopgate pointed out that m-commerce traffic is not only already representing more than 20 percent of all American internet traffic, but it is also expected to exceed desktop based internet traffic by the end of next year. The holiday season is predicted to be the transitional time into that exceptional rate of growth to the point that it will be greater on smartphones and tablets than it is on laptops.

The report pointed to a number of m-commerce findings from several recent studies.

For example, it pointed out that shopping over m-commerce is expected to reach $42 billion by the end of this year, and that it will make up a larger segment of e-commerce than has ever been experienced before, according to eMarketer.

In fact, the report went to the extent of saying that retailers that choose not to take part in m-commerce may be actively choosing not to take advantage of an important source of revenue. It pointed to data from Econsultancy, which indicated that 62 percent of businesses that have created a website that is specifically optimized for smartphones and tablets, had increased their sales. The recommendation for the upcoming holiday season was to use mobile friendly elements such as: coupons, push notifications, ad scanners, daily deals, QR codes, mobile SEO, and product categories.