OK, so the dust is settling on the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend and the numbers are in on how consumers shopped – and we can get a really good view of how mobile now fits in to the mix of how consumers shop.
So what have we learned? Here are some key findings from across the industry, some of it is contradictory, some of it clearly the result of vested interests and most of it pretty much what you would expect. Enjoy!
IBM
• Mobile came to the fore on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to IBM analysis. On Black Friday online sales were up by 91.6%, compared to 2013, with average order values up by 1.4% at £88.86. Mobile traffic accounted for 59.8% of all online traffic in the UK on Friday, said IBM, 30.32% more than last year, while mobile sales accounted for 47.3% of all sales, 35.5% up on last year.
• On Cyber Monday, shoppers using mobile spent less on each order – as an average – than last year, but mobile devices were used for a greater proportion of sales.
• Across devices, average order value was down by 4.05%, rising to 6.03% on mobile devices. But the proportion of sales made via mobile devices was up by 29.31% on last year, with smartphone usage up by 42.88% and tablet usage up by 12%, both as a percentage of overall sales.
Conversant
• Smartphone site visits more than doubled in 2014 versus last year, accounting for 43% of total traffic this year, compared to 20% last year.
• Mobile’s share of total purchases doubled year over year, representing 18% in 2014 compared to 9% in 2013.
• Tablet e-commerce traffic share declined, with site visits via tablets falling from 22% of total in 2013 to 17% in 2014.
• Across the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, 42% of consumers exhibited cross-device behavior by using multiple devices to shop (as opposed to exclusively on desktop).
• 33% of all online purchases seen on Black Friday came from consumer shopping on mobile devices – smartphones and tablets.
• The 35-39 age group was most likely to shop on multiple devices, and 27% of purchases from this group came from mobile devices.
• On average the 45-49 age group spent $147 per order, 8% higher than the average across all age groups. 21% of total purchases from this group came from mobile devices and the rest came from desktop.
Monetate
• Smartphone traffic was up by 59.1% on last year, tablet traffic by 41.9%, while traffic from laptops and PCs was up by 2.9%.
• Smartphone conversion grew by 59.1% on last year, while conversion from tablet was up by 3.5% from tablet and desktop and laptop by 10.2%.
Affiliate Window
• Manic Monday mobile traffic was 10% up on 2013, however when compared to Black Friday – which was 140% up and Cyber Monday which was 37% up on 2013 – it was the smallest of the three days
• On Black Friday, 32.2% of smartphone traffic and 25% of tablet traffic was for department stores. On Cyber Monday, 18.4% of smartphone traffic and 17.8% of tablet traffic was for department stores.
• See much more in this handy infographic