“Consumers are growing more comfortable buying fashion items on their phones reveals new Black Friday and Cyber Monday data from AI-powered retail personalisation platform, Nosto. And for fashion retailers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 was 36% bigger than last year.
Nosto’s analysis of millions of visits to fashion sites globally suggests mobile accounted for 71% of traffic and 56% of sales revenue (up from 64% of traffic and 50% of sales revenue in 2017) on the two holiday shopping days. Conversion rates are also up on mobile phones from 1.98% last year to 2.28% in 2018″
Wow…this press release is a treasure trove of data on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the entire shopping weekend for US, UK and Canada. Here’s just a snippet…
“In the U.S., 2018 Thanksgiving holiday shopping bounce rates increased by 12 percent from 2017. Additionally, cart abandonment rates increased by 2.6 percent and conversion rates decreased by 9.7 percent. Black Friday shopping in the U.S. revealed mixed results compared to 2017; while traffic was up 7.7 percent and Average Order Value (AOV) increased 2.5 percent, conversation rates were down 11.3 percent. On Cyber Monday, AOV was up 3.4 percent, but conversion rates were down 16.2 percent—a continuation of the YOY trend of U.S. shoppers consolidating purchases on the biggest online shopping day of the year.
“The holiday shopping period presents tremendous opportunity for retailers to win new shoppers and convert them into returning customers. Our data, however, reveals that brands are struggling to take advantage of this opportunity,” said Stephen Collins, CEO of Monetate. “Retailers must reconsider their engagement strategies to ensure they are capitalizing on increased website visits. It’s imperative that retailers leverage every data point at their disposal to create the best and most relevant experiences for shoppers.”
According to a 2016 report, the average yearly financial expense attributed to fraud for retailers was 7.6 percent of annual revenue across all channels, including online and offline sales. And that is on a business-as-usual day. On peak-retail days, clients operating on Amazon have reportedly seen an increase of 150 percent in fraud attempts.
But the online retail anti-fraud business is about to change, and that change is going to affect consumers and retailers as well. This is due to new EU regulation called PSD2. PSD2, which comes into effect in mid-2019, is mainly about opening bank APIs to 3rd parties. But it also includes provisions applying to online sales.
The intention of this directive is good at heart but unnecessarily provides friction to the more than 99 percent of users out there that are good, according to Lee: “We are essentially making buyers conform to a set of rules because the system is being exploited by a select few bad apples.
White said this is going to have a tremendous impact on the market, specifically in the e-commerce space: “Conversion rates are already low in this space, and any added obstacles or friction could correlate into an increase in cart abandonments.
This can be a difficult task because if it was simple we wouldn’t need the predictive power of machine learning in the first place.
On Thanksgiving Day, the traffic flowing through mobile devices represented 68 percent of all online traffic, according to Salesforce. And 54 percent of all digital orders that day were made through smart phones, the most of any day this year and roughly 30 percent more than in 2017.
Social media is also playing a growing role, with nearly 8 percent of traffic on Thanksgiving Day generated by platforms like Instagram and Facebook — a more than 40 percent uptick over 2017.
Digital research firm eMarketer has similar figures, saying that e-commerce spending will rise 16.6% to $123.73 billion, making up 12.3% of total holiday retail sales — the largest chunk ever.
“U.S. consumers increased their online shopping by nearly17 percentbefore Black Friday, according tonew datapublished byAdobe Analytics this week. Online shopping spend topped $31.9 billion in the first 20 days of November, including the first ‘$2 billion day of the season,‘ analysts said. That day was Monday, Nov. 19.”
