With the shopping phenomenon that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday over for another year, new research from ChannelAdvisor shows how mobile came out on top, reigning supreme, over desktop as consumers’ preferred method of shopping over the sales period.
According to reports from Barclaycard, payment transactions were 6% higher than last year’s Black Friday here in the UK. What’s more, the association for online retailers, IMRG, estimated that £1.27bn was spent on Black Friday this year, up 16% on last year.
But how were consumers purchasing their heavily discounted goods and browsing for the most competitive deals? And what were the differences between the UK and US, the latter being the creator of the biggest dates in today’s retail calendar?
According to data from ChannelAdvisor, mobile proved to be the preferred channel for purchasing goods in the UK, but there were some interesting differences between when consumers decided to use desktop computers versus mobile devices during the period deemed the ‘Cyber Five’ (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Saturday, Cyber Sunday and Cyber Monday):
Thanksgiving – Cyber Sunday 2016 – UK
• 73% of shopping searches took place on mobile devices (22% on tablets; 51% on mobile). This is an increase of 15% from 2015
• 64% of purchases took place on mobile devices (22.7% on tablets, 41.7% on mobile) compared to just 48% in 2015
• The most active day for browsing deals across all platforms (desktop, mobile and tablets) was Cyber Sunday, however it was Black Friday that generated the most purchases
• Mobile was the most popular shopping platform overall on Black Friday, however desktop computers accounted for 40% of purchases by UK shoppers.
• This decreased to 31% on Cyber Saturday, as shoppers moved activity from their work desktops to mobile platforms at home. 70% of all conversions took place on mobile devices on this day
UK versus US
• Looking at the ‘Cyber Five’ period, 75% of shopping searches in the US took place on mobile devices (10% on tablets, 65% on mobile)
• However, mobile accounted for less than one in two purchases (49%) in the US
• Across the pond, while the percentage of UK shopping searches on mobile platforms was slightly lower, Brits are a lot more confident making purchases through these devices, with more than three in five sales conversations taking place on mobile