Mobile accounts for 67% of traffic to fashion sites this holiday

Dive Brief:

Shopping via mobile phone accounted for nearly 67% of traffic to fashion retail sites and 52% of sales. Mobile phone conversion rates increased by 53% higher since the 2018 holiday season, per a report by Nosto, an artificial intelligence personalization platform.
While mobile phones brought in the most amount of traffic, desktop came in second with more than 27% of traffic, followed by tablets at merely 4%, the report found. Though mobile phone traffic brought in the most revenue, desktop sales came in a close second, according to the report.
Desktop sales accounted for the highest average order value at $107.16, followed by $101.72 via tablet and $97.71 via mobile, according to the report.

Dive Insight:

Reports have indicated that mobile shopping will be a crucial element to this holiday season. A report from the marketing technology company BounceX predicted that consumers would shop more on mobile than via desktop, and another report from BillTrust indicated that more than half of shoppers planned to shop via mobile devices for gifts this year.

A report from Bloomreach analyzing Black Friday results indicated that 66% of shoppers utilizing mobile visited business websites directly or via email marketing, followed by 14% who shopped through advertising search traffic and 13% via search engine. Additionally, Salesforce found that mobile orders increased 35% this year. Of the over $900 million total sales made by Shopify merchants, 69% of purchases were made on mobile, with the remaining 31% on desktop.

The difference in consumers' average purchase value between mobile and desktop is noteworthy, Nosto CEO Jim Lofgren explained in a statement.

"As they're making shorter visits on a smaller screen, you'd expect mobile fashion shoppers to be harder to convince to make a purchase, and to be less likely to place larger orders — which we see in the data," Lofgren said. "But now that online fashion shopping is overwhelmingly mobile, being successful as a retailer comes down to having a truly mobile-first mentality."