US shoppers increasingly turned to apps for their Peak season shopping, according to user statistics released by publisher and ecommerce app marketplace, Button.
The site – where mobile commerce publishers can co-locate their apps, building a sort of m-commerce marketplace that shoppers can use as a one-stop-shop for finding what they are looking for on mobile – saw a 108% rise in app installs compared to Peak 2018 translating into 106% increase in orders and a 121% rise in spending across the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
In fact, according to the company Thanksgiving was one of the strongest days of the holiday season, demonstrating the mobile consumer is highly responsive to the many offers retailers promoted on the holiday, says Button’s report.
Cyber Week – the Monday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday – displayed the biggest purchase volume throughout the entire holiday season, which makes sense considering it includes the three largest purchasing days of the season. Purchases rose first thing in the morning and late at night.
The Button Marketplace saw electronics purchases spike at midnight on both Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday and toy purchases spike on Cyber Monday, indicating that consumers begin browsing and shopping for toys after getting those electronics deals.
Home supplies, sports and outdoors, as well as clothing and fashion purchases remained steady throughout the holiday season, with higher purchase rates than previously seen in 2018. This suggests consumers are willing to wait past the Cyber Week rush to see if they can score a deal during the later weeks of the holiday season.
The items purchased suggest the mobile consumer splurged on technology and household items that they might not have purchased regularly throughout the year. This generally aligns with an industry shift towards last minute shopping and self-gifting purchases while holiday shopping.
Considering these last minute, spur-of-the-moment purchases, many categories and items benefit from the on-the-go nature of mobile purchases.
Additional, mobile and app commerce is driving the use of new retailers. Research from Think with Googleshows that 61% of shoppers are open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season. Backing this up, the Button Marketplace saw a spike in first-time brand shoppers, mostly attributed to new app users.
But it is the power users – those users that repeatedly buy from a brand and which, according to the Pareto Principle dictates that business revenue relies on a group of users who shop more regularly and spend more – that drove m-commerce this Peak.
According to Button’s stats, half of all users who shopped during Cyber Week shopped again during the rest of the holiday period. The convenience of mobile allows shoppers to spread out their shopping across multiple days and transact at a higher rate. Power users, users who last shopped within 30 days of Cyber Week, represent only 8% of shoppers yet accounted for 22% of all the sales during the holiday period, made more than six shopping trips,and converted twice as much as the average users.
