Telecom Lead India: A recent analytics into mobile shopping in the U.S. on Black Friday suggests there is significant opportunity for retailers, app vendors, device manufacturers, mobile operators, and advertisers who invest in more innovative mobile shopping experiences.
The report from mobile analytics provider Mobidia Technology highlights the growing importance of mobile shopping among smartphone and tablet users, and highlights their preference for online retailers.
In the U.S alone there are more than 119 million smartphone users. The analytics has revealed shopping on mobile devices is significant. Of the consumers who track their data usage with Mobidia’s My Data Manager, 12 percent used a smartphone shopping application on Black Friday.
When applied to the entire U.S. population, this suggests approximately 14 million consumers used their smartphones on Black Friday to shop. That is 30 percent more than the average of 9.5 percent on previous days in 2012, demonstrating the importance of Black Friday for mobile shoppers.
On average, mobile shoppers spent 16 percent more time using shopping applications on Black Friday when compared to previous days in 2012.
Shoppers spent more than 10 minutes using the most popular shopping applications on Black Friday. This is significant when compared to usage of the most popular mobile applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, web browsers and maps, which had average usage times of 12 to 22 minutes on that day.
Online retailers saw the most traffic on their shopping apps. Applications from Amazon and EBay had more than five times the usage when compared with the mobile apps from traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
“As expected, our Black Friday analysis showed that many consumers shopped on their smartphones on Black Friday, but shoppers appear to be gravitating toward online retailers for their mobile shopping,” says Chris Hill, vice president of marketing at Mobidia. “This could be attributed to shoppers’ experience with online shopping on desktop computers, unsatisfying experiences with the shopping apps of traditional retailers, or just a general lack of awareness.”
