Smartphones are slowly but surely replacing standard computers in the lives of many Americans, and industry numbers from Black Friday show a dramatic increase in the use of mobile devices for holiday shopping.
According to MobileSyrup, IBM Watson Trend, a division of the multinational company that analyzes online shopping data, said that approximately 60% of all online shoppers in the U.S. visited popular retailers like Amazon on their mobile device, as opposed to a desktop computer, laptop, or even a tablet.
While merely visiting websites on a smartphone isn’t out of the norm, the data went on to note that 40% of online shoppers actually completed their purchase using a smartphone or tablet. Justin Norwood, a product strategist for IBM, thinks that the increase in smartphone purchases is largely due to retailers placing a heavier emphasis on mobile optimization.
“Both on the hits side and on the sales side, the smartphone is outpacing tablets, and smartphone shoppers dominate,” said Norwood. “It seems like this is the breakout year for mobile optimization, and retailers have invested a considerable amount in their mobile sites.”
Nowadays, an estimated 28% of all web traffic comes from mobile users, and that percentage continues to grow as more companies invest time and money into making their website mobile-friendly. Adobe’s Digital Index, a system that collects data on 100 of the top U.S. retailers, found that 37% of all traffic to these sites on Black Friday came from mobile devices.
According to Forbes, e-commerce analytics firm Custora said that mobile shopping on Black Friday saw a whopping 30.3% increase from last year. About 77.6% of all orders came from iPhones or iPads, while only 22.1% came from Android devices.
IBM added that their data observations don’t even include Canadian stats, which would likely increase the percentage of mobile shoppers on Black Friday by even more. About two-thirds of Canadians consider their smartphone as their primary computer, which means they also likely used mobile devices for most of their holiday shopping.
If this data is any sign of things to come, it seems as if mobile shopping could become the new preference for bargain hunters during the holidays. The crazed hordes of Black Friday shoppers stampeding through malls may soon be a thing of the past.