“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.
So will AI, for perhaps the first time, as smart systems are helping to drive more than a third of all retail revenue.
This upcoming Cyber Week will be the biggest digital week ever. We predict that 40% of the entire shopping season’s revenue will be made the first week of the season, which is up from 32% last year. Black Friday, predicted to be up 19% and Cyber Monday, up 16%, will lead the charge for the critical Cyber Week period.
This is the year that mobile wins! Shoppers will again turn to their phones for visiting sites – as phones will drive 68% of the season’s traffic.
And on peak mobile days, like Christmas Eve, mobile will drive a massive 72% of all traffic and 54% of all orders.
Over the last year, we’ve seen shoppers come to appreciate the value of AI in their overall shopping experience. AI-powered product recommendations have had a massive impact and are driving 37% of all revenue
As we wrap 11/11 (aka Singles Day) we have officially begun the start of the holiday shopping season. With that in mind, I thought it would be the perfect time for a 2017 refresher.
“AsDeloitte predicted, the weeks leading up to Black Friday/late November and late December accounted for up to 80% of retail sales in the holiday season, withonline retail shoppingemerging the clear winner in sales contributions.
TheNational Retail Federationrevealed last week that retail sales outperformed last year’s numbers by over 5.5%, with revenue from online sales and non-store sales shot to $138.4 billion, seeing an 11.5% rise over last year’s numbers.
According toAdobe Insights, 2017 is the first year where holiday sales have surpassed the $100 billion mark in digital transactions alone.
