Holiday shopping seems to start earlier and earlier every year, and not just for brick and mortar stores. Online deals formerly reserved for Cyber Monday were available starting on Thanksgiving Day for some retailers, with some brands extending discounts into a weeklong Cyber Monday event. All of these sales events lead to the biggest online sales day ever at over $3 billion.
For savvy eCommerce retailers, the high demand is no surprise, and many sites have been preparing all year for this busy weekend. As we discussed back in September, ensuring that your mobile site was ready for the holiday rush was a crucial aspect to preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and this year’s mobile statistics proved that energy was well spent.
Starting on Thanksgiving Day, eCommerce sales were up 24% from 2014, with 52% of early shoppers using smartphones and tablets. On Black Friday alone, IBM reports that online sales were up 21.5% from last year, with 44.7% of online traffic coming from smartphones. On Cyber Monday, online sales were up 17.8% over 2014, with smartphone traffic on the rise. The average order on Cyber Monday was $133, with more than a quarter of those purchases coming from mobile devices, according to Adobe.
All of that activity lead to a Thanksgiving weekend with 25.2% more online sales year over year.
This growth of the mobile aspect of Thanksgiving weekend eCommerce is important information, if somewhat expected. Some other information about where specifically that mobile traffic is coming from sheds light on shoppers’ mobile habits.
As reported by IBM, the average order value from tablets on Black Friday was the highest among online shoppers this year, at $136.42. For desktop, the average order value was $134.06, and mobile $121.06.
Custora was able to drill down even farther to discover that Apple devices were driving mobile shopping this year, with 77.6% of mobile orders coming from devices running iOS. That number was even higher when looking at just tablet activity, with the iPad dominating at 84% of tablet traffic according to Adobe.
So, what did we learn? If this year’s statistics are any indication, Cyber Monday is coming earlier, and online sales during Thanksgiving weekend are only expected to grow in the coming years. If you’re optimizing for a tablet, make it the iPad, or better yet, invest in responsive design and mobile-friendly checkout to cover all of your bases. Additionally, be sure to run tests on both your desktop and mobile sites, and optimize those instances for site speed.
For even more information about preparing your site for holiday shoppers, check out the 12 Days of eCommerce Christmas.
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