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Mobile drives 52% of online fashion sales and 67% of traffic this Christmas shopping season

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An early analysis of fashion shopping habits globally this holiday season shows mobile phones account for 67% of traffic to fashion retail sites and 52% of sales revenue. 

Conversion rates on phones jumped 53% higher since last year, suggesting a large impact from both consumers growing more accustomed to buying fashion on their smartphones and retailers better utilising personalisation technologies.

The data comes from Nosto the AI-powered ecommerce personalisation platform which analysed millions of shopping visits to fashion sites globally as shoppers hunted for bargains on the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. The research is an early indication of fashion shopping trends this holiday season.

Many of the performance metrics suggest that consumers are showing a greater commitment to shopping for fashion on their phones; especially conversion rates which have jumped from 2.18% in 2018 to 3.33% this year. However, there remains work to do for online retailers.

The conversion rate on phones is still half that of desktop (3.33% v 6.2%), and holiday shoppers on their phones are spending nearly 9% less per order on average than those on computers. At the same time, those who visit on their phones stay fewer minutes on site and are 10% more likely to abandon their shopping cart than desktop visitors (76% v 66%).

“As they’re making shorter visits on a smaller screen, you’d expect mobile fashion shoppers to be harder to convince to make a purchase, and to be less likely to place larger orders — which we see in the data,” says Jim Lofgren, CEO of Nosto.

Lofgren continues: “But now that online fashion shopping is overwhelmingly mobile, being successful as a retailer comes down to having a truly mobile-first mentality — making it easy for shoppers to find their way around your site and quickly find just the products they want, and to check out with minimum effort.”

He concludes: “That’s where using artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive personalisation comes in. You can maximise the space and time on a mobile phone screen by automatically showing shoppers the most relevant shopping experience based on their behaviour — all in real-time. In fact, it’s now possible to instantly change the layout of the page and ensure shoppers are seeing the most appropriate images, offers and related content that might interest them.”

Overall, across all devices the data shows a 15% increase in traffic year on year to fashion retail sites over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping weekend, together with a 78% jump in online sales, suggesting the large impact of personalisation on driving more revenue from each visit.

“The numbers suggest there’s more opportunity than ever for fashion retail to build online sales in the run up to the holidays. But you have to make sure you’re delivering the best experiences you can to truly embrace that fact,” adds Lofgren.

Nosto’s fashion retail customers including Gymshark, Aquascutum, Everlast, Helly Hansen and Volcom.

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