Mobile drove 61% of online traffic this Holiday Season

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Jan. 8, 2015 - PRLog -- As early reports start to trickle in about the 2014 holiday season, retailers are waiting with bated breath to see how they fared compared to other offline and online merchants. These reports will probably also signal the way 2015 is going to shape up. While retailers will soon be caught up in a mire of statistics, metrics and benchmarks, one question that is looming large in their minds already is “Which channels worked best this holiday season”.

Amazon announced that nearly 60% of their customers shopped from a mobile device this holiday season. Visit http://www.iclarified.com/46244/amazon-announces-its-holiday-shopping-stats-bestsellers for more details. Wait, what?! Yes, Amazon sold more stuff on mobile than it did on desktops, making this the biggest headline yet in 2015. And their app made a killing too, doubling their sales from 2013.

There is more. As the holidays got closer (and the shoppers got more nervous), the number of mobile shoppers accelerated further. Particularly, Cyber Monday and Black Friday peaked for mobile shopping. This is unsurprising, considering that last minute purchases are made in a hurry on the go.

Mobile was expected to represent one-eighth of e-commerce spending this holiday season, which is a big number to begin with. Visit http://fortune.com/2014/11/18/holiday-ecommerce for a detailed report. So retailers are understandably stunned to see Amazon’s holiday stats.

We decided to break these numbers down further. After all, Amazon by itself represents about 25% of America’s e-commerce market. And the top 10 retailers represent about half of it. So extrapolating their numbers for the rest of the ecommerce industry might be statistically incorrect. MartMobi, a mobile commerce platform that serves small and medium sized online merchants gave us some statistics that showed mobile was equally (if not more) effective for these merchants.

Merchants got about 61% of their traffic from mobile devices and engagement was nearly 87% higher. The most surprising statistics, however, were the conversion rates and the average order values. Mobile has traditionally been known to lag behind desktop on these metrics. However, merchants saw both these metrics on par between desktop and mobile this holiday season. Add to that the mobile attribution of several desktop sales and clearly mobile was the biggest driver of online shopping this holiday season.

Effectus Clothing is a street wear brand from New York which adopted mobile ahead of the holiday season. Its CEO, Brian Danesi says “We were forced to get mobile-friendly by our customers, because that is where they shop. I am glad we did it before the holiday season because that gave us a huge boost this Christmas.”

Other merchants will soon have to follow Brian and serve their mobile shopping customers if they want to exploit the full potential of e-commerce.

“Mobile sites and native apps are faster today than a year ago. For instance, mobile stores powered by MartMobi load about 64% faster than normal stores. This is the biggest difference between mobile shopping in the holidays of 2013 versus 2014. Faster sites lead to better experiences and better sales,” says Satya Ganni, CEO of MartMobi.