Tag: mobile shopping

Retailers are reporting promising results from the holiday shopping weekend

The most significant retail holiday in the United States, Black Friday, has come and gone and many retailers saw a spike in total sales thanks to mobile commerce. Wal-Mart reported that it experienced the best three-day online shopping period it has seen in recent history and the company’s experience is being echoed by others that have adopted a focus on the digital space. According to a report from comScore, e-commerce sales throughout the United States surpassed $1 billion for the first time.

Total retail sales are lower this year than they were in 2013

While more people are shopping online, especially from their mobile devices, the retail sector has encountered some turbulence this year. Total retail sales for the holiday shopping weekend were down this year when compared to the results of 2013, according to the National Retail Federation. Many consumers opted to avoid physical stores in favor of mobile and e-commerce, while others opted to avoid holiday shopping altogether. The exact reasons behind lower retail sales this year and not entirely clear.

E-commerce is thriving among consumers interested in convenient shopping solutions

The report from comScore notes that consumers are shopping more from their personal computers and mobile devices. The report shows that shopping from a PC increased by 32% on Thanksgiving Day and 26% on Black Friday. Throughout November, purchases made from desktop computers rose by 15%. The report suggests that mobile commerce accounted for approximately 2% of all digital sales made during the holiday shopping weekend.

Mobile commerce has helped some retailers find success

The report also shows that e-commerce spending reached $1.009 billion this year, higher than the $766 million reported last year. Shopping online has become quite popular among consumers because of the convenience that it offers. When shopping at home from a computer, consumers can avoid the chaotic crowds that flock to retail stores on Black Friday. This convenience can also be found through mobile commerce, which allows people to purchase the products they are interested in at any time, no matter where they may be.

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.