Holiday 2017 Ecommerce: The Season of the Smartphone
In the Holiday Season 2018, it is a given that your ecommerce customers will be interacting with your website from a smartphone or tablet than a desktop. The 2017 holiday season was another record-breaker in online sales. The holiday online “and other non-store” sales of $138.4 billion that the National Retail Federation (NRF) reported. The NRF numbers represent an increase of 11.5 percent year over year.
NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay says that Holiday Season’s 2017’s e-commerce results prove that retail is the most nimble industry in the US economy. “Retail today doesn’t look like retail 10 years ago, and it certainly won’t look the same in another 10 years,” Shay observed, noting how the retail industry continues to transform and reinvent itself to meet consumer demands. Shay’s observations are indicative of a record breaking 2018 holiday season, driven in no small part by smartphones and mobile commerce.
In the Year of Mobile Commerce
For the first time in retail history, more than half the online visits (54%) to retail sites are coming from smartphones and tablets. Between 2015 and 2017, the share of visits by desktop have declined from 55% to 46%. ADI found that 64% of shoppers already have a retail app downloaded on their mobile devices. Notably, year 2018 is the first year in which millennials and Gen Z are overtaking baby boomers as the largest demographic of consumers.
Our recent mobile-first blog post pointed out that 93% of people who use a mobile phone for research will then go on to make a purchase and one study found mobile accounts for 35% of all retail eCommerce transactions. About 84% of users have experienced difficulty completing a mobile transaction. Statistics also reveal that 40% of users will go to the competitor after a bad mobile experience.
According to Justin Smith, CEO of Outer Box, it is extremely important to make sure your website is primed for mobile viewing, with more than half of all internet traffic coming from a mobile device:
User-Friendly
Your website should be programmed to intuitively adapt to whatever device is accessing it in order to provide the most user-friendly experience.Tap-Friendly
Make sure all buttons, links and calls to action have the appropriate size and margin to prevent errors.Text Phone Numbers
Make sure all phone numbers are text and not images so users can tap-to-call, or copy and paste the number to share with a friend.Visual Content
Mobile websites are usually viewed on the go and on much smaller screens, so utilizing visual content such as infographics and videos will be preferred over reading lengthy text.Main Navigation
Increase padding around menu items so it is easy for the user to read and tap on menu items.Contact Forms
Increase form input fields so it’s easy for the user to fill out the form.
In Closing
With these market facts in mind, it is your responsibility in the year ahead to create a shopping experience that appeals to your customers in time for the Holiday season 2018. Year 2018 offers you a great opportunity as a commerce operator to capitalize on consumer conversion just by creating a user-friendly mobile-first eCommerce site. Make 2018 a ‘Mobile First’ year in which your retail experience begins with the smallest mobile device and scale upwards towards desktop computers.
If you would like to learn more about Smartphones and the Holiday Season 2018, write to us at engage@mcfadyen.com or connect with us on Twitter @McFadyenDigital
