Black Friday is fast approaching, and mobile holiday shopping is expected to continue its growth as users hunker down with their smartphones and tablets to make holiday purchases in addition to — or instead of — visits to retail stores.
Here are four predictions for 2017 mobile holiday shopping:
-Online shopping is expected to surpass the $100 billion mark for the first time, according to Adobe Digital Insights’ round-up of predictions for the holiday shopping season. That’s a nearly 14% increase from last year. Thanksgiving weekend will account for an estimated $19.7 billion in online sales. And the role of mobile? AADI says that “while desktop purchases still account for two-thirds of revenue year-round, mobile is often the starting point for many shoppers.” Web site visits on either smartphones or tablets will account for 54% of holiday web shopping traffic this season, up from 50% last year, according to ADI, and smartphones dominate that traffic. ADI also noted that 64% of shoppers have a retail application already downloaded onto their mobile devices, but only about 32% will download an app specifically for holiday shopping. Adobe based its insights on analysis of data including 1 trillion visits to more than 4,500 retail web sites, 12 million social media mentions and a research survey of 1,100 U.S. consumers.
-In a survey of more than 1,000 Americans between the ages of 25 and 55 with at least one child, Lending Tree found that 76% of respondents plan to spend the same amount or more on holiday shopping compared to last year, with the average shopping budget of $943; respondents said that they expect to do half of their shopping online and 34% of their shopping via their smartphone. That number was even higher for Millennials, who plan to do about 40% of their shopping via smartphone.
-Mobile security firm Trustlook found via a survey that the perception of security on mobile is a strong factor in how willing people are to make purchases via their smart devices this holiday season. “Those who feel secure on their device will shop and spend much more than those who don’t. It’s that simple,” said Allan Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Trustlook. Trustlook found that more than 80% of people who expected to do holiday shopping via mobile device agreed or strongly agrees that they felt secure shopping on their deice, while around half of non-shoppers felt the same. Trustlook also found that 45% of the users it surveyed expected to spend more than $250 on purchases via a mobile device.
-Deloitte found in its pre-holiday shopping retail survey that “regardless of where people shop, many will rely on digital shopping tools for assistance. Nearly 4 in 10 (38 percent) expect to buy something online while in-store due to better pricing and/or price matching, and 36 percent say they’ll be influenced by deals from a mobile device while in-store over Thanksgiving weekend. Consumers also may not have much tolerance for website performance issues, as 46 percent said they’ll use another retailer rather than wait if an online site has technical problems.”
Deloitte also found that 22% of its survey respondents expected to pay for purchases with a mobile wallet app in-store, and 40% planned to use a retailer’s smartphone app. Deloitte estimated that retailers have a 59% chance of getting a smartphone shopper to make a purchase, compared to a 75% chance for someone shopping via a laptop or desktop.
