For the second consecutive year, Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are providing the spike in data that helps to show what we have been talking about throughout the year. Customers are increasingly browsing and shopping on their mobiles - and if your site isn’t optimised, you are about to lose out.
Overall, mobile purchases soared over the holiday with 24 percent of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 14.3 percent in 2011, and
Paypal are reporting that global mobile payment volumes were up 193% on last year.
Mobile sales exceeded 16 percent, up from 9.8 percent in 2011.Unsurprisingly, the iPad contributed to more traffic than any other smartphone or tablet, taking 10 percent of online shopping. This was followed by iPhone at 8.7 percent and Android at 5.5 percent.
IBM says US department stores saw online sales grow by 16.8 percent over Black Friday 2011. And mobile sales reached 16.3 percent of total sales for Black Friday.
As reported by the Branding Brands index on
Tech Crunch,“While most industry reports capture overall mobile usage, a true chasm of analytical performance data exists between how people use mobilized and non-mobilized websites. Lumping both formats together in the same report skews usage data, since engagement is much higher on mobilized sites when there’s no need constantly pinch and zoom. We are finding that,
if you build a mobile site, the mobile dollars are coming much faster."
A detailed breakdown of mobile shopping data reinforces our understanding that iPhone/ iPad owners are typically more affluent, and are probably on their second or even 3rd generation Apple device by now whereas Android owners are more price sensitive, and the majority of them will still be on their first "smartphone". it appears that Android owners are using their phones more for "showrooming" than spending still, and that when they spend, they are hunting for deals...
In total, on Thanksgiving, Branding Brand’s index showed:
- 3,086,154 visitors (63% iOS; 32% Android)
- 17,364,602 page views (62% iOS; 33% Android)
- 29,880 orders (70% iOS; 29% Android)
- $81 average order value ($81 iOS; $80 Android)
20.25% of total e-commerce traffic came from smartphonesOn Black Friday, sales were up 128%, with visits up 101%, pageviews up 99%, and average order value decreased by 7.46% (there must have been some deep discounts out there.)
On Black Friday, Branding Brand’s index included:
- 3,513,367 visitors (63% iOS; 32% Android)
- 20,708,053 page views (62% iOS; 33% Android)
- 50,905 orders (69% iOS; 29% Android)
- $78.92 average order value ($80.37 iOS; $75.43 Android)
- 20.44% of total e-commerce traffic came from smartphones
So despite the dominance of Android device ownership, Apple owners are still key for mobile commerce, although the percentage of their dominance is beginning to reduce as Android owners get better devices and become more comfortable with mCommerce.
There are more reports and stats out there than is reasonable, frankly, to support all of this trending evidence. Here are a few highlights to get you started:
Keep an eye on your analytics and expect the percentage of visits and sales from Android (and other OS) to continue to eat into Apple's dominance through 2013.
