subject: Holiday 2012: Chasing The Multi-tasking, Multi-channel, & Multi-device Shopper [print this page] The holiday shopping season is just a few short months away, and for retailers, the race is on not just to get their products and employees ready, but to chase down ever-more-elusive customers armed with an array of connected devices that power their shopping sprees. For years now, industry watchers have heralded the rise of the mobile shopper. But 2012 will likely mark the official dawn of the post-PC shopping era. This year, the plus-or-minus impact of mobile shopping on a retailers bottom line will be significant, with as much as 20 percent fully one in five shoppers arriving at websites via something other than a computer.1
In 2012, mobile doesnt just mean logging on via a smartphone or tablet. The mobile customer is jumping from smartphone to laptop to tablet, at the office, in the car, on the sofa, in the store. Todays customers just wont sit still, and their attention spans and patience are short and getting shorter.
Retailers who dont have a mobile strategy, or at least an optimized mobile website, will wish they had one this year. But now theres a lot more to it than just making sure your website loads & looks OK on a smartphone. Theres not one stream of visitors shopping the desktop site, and another stream shopping the smartphone site, and another shopping the tablet site. Theyre bouncing from one to the other depending on where they are and what they want to do, and they expect a site to be similarly satisfying no matter how theyre viewing it. Which means if you lose a shopper on the smartphone or tablet, you may lose them on the desktop, too; you might even lose them for good.
Google Shopper is one of scores of apps shoppers will use this holiday season to find what they want, on and offline.
Chasing down the multi-tasking, multi-device shopper requires a commitment to delivering outstanding experiences and insisting on outstanding performance on all three screens. But this is the year to definitely think of putting mobile first. Last years results are positively an indication of where things will go this holiday season
2011: Another record-breaking year
Holiday online sales in general, and mobile in particular, continued to smash records in 2011, despite a continued sluggish economic recovery. The November-December period saw a 15 percent jump in online sales, to $37.5 billion, including 10 days that broke the $1 billion mark.2 Brick-and-mortar stores saw just 4 percent growth in sales.
Mobile traffic to retail sites more than doubled year-over-year in December, to 14.6 percent, and sales fully doubled to 11 percent.3 In other words, $1 out of every $10 came in via a mobile device. On Christmas Day itself, 18.3 percent of traffic and 14.4 percent of sales were via mobile, again more than doubling 2010.4
Footnotes:
1.IBM
2.comScore, U.S. Online Holiday Shopping Season Reaches Record $37.2 Billion for November-December Period, press release, 1/4/12
3.IBM, Mobile Shopping Doubles Over December 2011 Holiday, Reports IBM, press release, 1/10/12
4.Internet Retailer, Mobile commerce played an integral part of the 2011 holiday season, by Bill Siwicki, 1/6/12
