This past holiday shopping season proved to be one of the most successful, in terms of sales, in recent memory. Increased consumer spending was an important indicator of economic recovery. In addition to hints of a healthy economy, the holiday season stats emphasized another huge change in consumers’ lives: the shift in the way they shop.
Mobile shopping saw a tremendous increase over the last year; according to IBM’s report, mobile shopping has doubled over the last year alone. This growth was not surprising though — lately, consumers have been using smart phones more than ever before. According to PC Mag, 44% of Americans now own smart phones, up from 18% two years ago.
As mobile web traffic and the use of mobile devices for shopping continues to surge, Chitika Insights wanted to investigate specific aspects of mobile shopping as seen on our network. Rather than look at mobile shopping in its entirety, we wanted to break down the level of shopping activity we are seeing across various mobile devices to give some insight into behavior patterns of consumers.
In order to quantify the study, we used our proprietary algorithm to analyze the frequency of “shopping” related web activity across various mobile devices, including the iPad tablet. Our study was comprised of a sample of hundreds of millions of impressions based in the US and Canada, between March 13th and March 20th.
Within the time frame included in our study, mobile based web traffic related to “shopping” accounted for 34% of all “shopping” related impressions including PC searches. Compared to the figure we reported in November 2011, where only 11.5% of “shopping” related web searches were coming from mobile devices, mobile shopping as a percentage of overall shopping impressions has increased by almost 200%.
To get a deeper insight into this rapidly growing number, we broke down the results by mobile device to see which device was generating the most “shopping” related web search traffic. While the iPad, iPhone, and Android were neck in neck in our previous report, our latest data shows that Android users exhibit a significantly higher level of engagement in mobile shopping behaviors than iPhone and iPad users.
The iPhone, and iPod are currently tailing Android with 1.86% and 1.40% mobile shopping interest respectively, while iPad remains far behind with 0.58% share of mobile based shopping activity overall.
The results could be an indicator as to the changes in consumers shopping behaviors in a short period of time. For example, the iPad’s reduced share of shopping activity may be related to an increased trend in shopping online on the fly. As location-aware mobile shopping applications such as Emporium and Shopkick become more popular, consumers might be turning to those with highly personalized results rather than tablets which are relatively more static devices.
Even though desktops are still the go-to device for online shopping, the shift toward mobile is apparent. Desktops relinquishing the lead to mobile might be just around the corner. It is better for both publishers and providers to take action in terms of targeting accordingly before it is too late to get a big chunk of e-commerce market share.
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