Adobe recently released its 2016 Digital Insights Shopping Predictions, providing key insights for merchants on consumer trends and behavior in the impending holiday shopping season. A key finding suggests that retailers without a strong mobile presence might miss out on significant revenue on Black Friday and other holiday events compared to their connected counterparts.
Estimates project that 53 percent of retail shopping visits on Black Friday will come from mobile devices, as mobile continues to rise above desktop as the main medium of choice for online shoppers. However, the State of the Mobile Experience report shows that 54 percent of retailers are struggling to integrate an adequate mobile strategy.
And of retailers with mobile apps, 48 percent experience recurring slow page load times, 31 percent have difficult-to-navigate mobile platforms and 28 percent experience recurring malfunctions with their mobile platforms.
Customers don’t just use mobile to make purchases. They also use mobile searches as gifting inspiration. During last year’s holiday shopping season, mobile searches for “unique gifts” grew more than 65 percent year over year. Similarly, mobile searches related to “cool gifts” grew more than 80 percent.
Encountering any of these issues in the flurry of searching and shopping activities could be enough to turn paying customers away from retailers ill-equipped in the mobile space and push them onto competitors’ sites. And this could be costly for merchants, this year more than ever.
This year’s Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are expected to be the largest online shopping days in U.S. history. There’s a projected total of $8.4 billion at stake for retailers in those three days alone, with almost $92 billion up for grabs over the entire holiday shopping season. But a large chunk of that could be missed out on by retailers with ineffective mobile commerce solutions.