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Mobile E-Commerce Sites Show Major Holiday Spike in U.S. and Western Europe

By Jacqueline Lee
Contributing Writer

The mobile shopping audience in the United States increased 42 percent over the holidays. In Western Europe, mobile shopping increased 36 percent in Spain, 35 percent in the U.K. and 34 percent in France during the same time period.

An analysis of mobile traffic to shopping websites provided by Opera Software ASA uncovered the increases in a report released today. Opera also discovered that Americans did most of their shopping between Black Friday and Cyber Monday (News - Alert) (what Opera calls, “Wireless Weekend”) while European traffic spiked most, oddly, on Christmas Day.

Whether mobile users are looking up prices and product reviews or actually shopping using their mobile devices, an increasing number of shoppers are relying on the mobile platform for purchasing and product comparison. “I think the biggest take away from 2011 holiday marketing was the emergence of an enormous mobile marketing gap amongst retailers,” said Paul Gelb, vice president of mobile at Razorfish in Seattle, Washington, told Mobile Commerce Daily. “Retailers that are not ready are ceding high ground to their competitors and may have trouble leveling the playing field in the future.”

One practice among retailers was creating a website that would render no matter what type of device consumers used to access it. Savvy retailers also gave consumers a choice to shop on either a mobile optimized site or on the company’s full website. The objective was to create the same functionality on any device in case the mobile optimized site lacked something that the customer needed.

While some retailers did a good job with mobile during Q4 of 2011, others missed some major opportunities. Some retailers, for instance, did not create a streamlined checkout process that allowed shoppers to make purchases directly from their mobile phones. According to Matt Coffman, CTO of iGoDigital, “The presumption that customers will research on mobile and buy on desktop will get you through in the short term, but, in the long term, mobile is here to stay and a lot of retailers haven’t made the jump to make it easy to buy on a cell phone.”

Shoppers also went to mobile to check pricing and store availability, which some retailers failed to include among their mobile options. Still other shoppers expressed frustration with a lack of product review access or recommendations based on their past shopping experiences when they perused a retailer’s website on their mobile devices.

Going forward, according to Coffman and other experts, businesses will have to incorporate mobile into their e-commerce strategies. Mobile is one of the largest growth segments among consumers who shop online.

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