If you visit a U.S. retailer’s website this holiday season, you’re most likely to do so on a mobile device.
For the first time, more people will do their holiday shopping on mobile than on desktop
Revenue is catching up.
Sandy Huffaker / Getty Images
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
More than half of visits to shopping sites — 54 percent — will come from smartphones and tablets, surpassing desktop computers for the first time, according to Adobe Analytics’ annual suite of online holiday retail predictions. Customers are still more likely to actually complete a purchase on desktop after looking on mobile, but that’s changing.
Mobile shopping will account for 34 percent of online purchase revenue, up from 30 percent last year. That means that mobile will have a bigger share of the predicted $107.4 billion in online holiday spending this year, up from $94.4 billion in 2016.
While there’s still a disparity between mobile retail website visits and revenue, the move toward mobile shopping is inevitable. That trend will only grow as e-commerce eats up a larger portion of traditional brick-and-mortar retail.
And retailers with better mobile websites and easier mobile payment integration stand to benefit the most. This trend also has implications for mobile advertising, which will get an increasing share of ad sales.
Some other predictions from the report:
- Cyber Monday is forecasted to be the largest online shopping day in history, with $6.6 billion in online sales predicted, up 16.5 percent from 2016.
- Thanksgiving online spending is expected to grow 15 percent this year to $2.8 billion.
- One-sixth ($19.7 billion) of online holiday spending will occur between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
These forecasts are based on back-end data on one trillion visits to more than 4,500 retail sites through the months of November and December. It does not include sales through retailer apps.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
