Well, it's here. We're in the thick of the holiday ecommerce
season. Mobile traffic to our retailers' sites is growing steadily and we're
already seeing more overall traffic than last year.
Though we're still a few days away from the busiest shopping
events of the year, visits to retailers' sites would suggest that we're on
track with eMarketer's
predictions that ecommerce sales will rise 15 percent this year and that
mobile sales will account for 16 percent of those sales. Of course, visiting a
site and making a purchase are two very different activities, but the interest
is there - now it's up to the retailers to turn those browsers into buyers.
Let's take a look at some of our supporting data from this
year and last.
The above figure represents traffic growth from our
real-time Retail
Net Usage Index (NUI) for a few days earlier this month. The last day shown
here is Nov. 20 (last Wednesday). This upward momentum is typical of
pre-Thanksgiving traffic, but what is interesting is that last Wednesday saw a 25%
increase in peak traffic over the highest spike on the same day last year
(which was just three days before Black Friday), with nearly 5.3 million page
views per minute. If this kind of growth continues, we could see more than 10
million page views per minute on Cyber Monday this year! (Check out our earlier
post for a snapshot of what Cyber Monday looked like in 2012).
If you're interested in how much of last year's traffic came
from mobile devices, take a look at the 2012 breakdown (above) of Black Friday
traffic from devices such as iPads, iPhones, Androids, Kindles and Nooks, and
Galaxy Tabs. This data is inclusive of all mobile retailer site visits on this
popular shopping day, so remember that in addition to browsing products
on-the-go and on the couch, many were also visiting
ecommerce sites in the stores to read reviews, check product availability
and shipping options, and research prices. Since 2010, we've seen
year-over-year mobile usage grow by 8 to 10%, and we expect to see a similar
climb again this holiday season.
As we consider how mobile traffic will grow this holiday
shopping season, it's interesting to look at how it was trending in the early
half of this quarter. The above charts illustrate the mobile activity from more
than 30 of our top retailers' sites from Oct. 1 to Nov. 13 this year. Though
the previous bar graph shows that 24% of Black Friday traffic came from
smartphone and tablet use, this pie chart of recent data shows an average
mobile use of nearly 32%.
Another interesting note from this more recent mobile data
is the fact that more than 13% of the visits came from iPads, 11% came from
iPhones, and 8% came from Android devices. Note that "non-cellular" means the
devices were likely WiFi-enabled as opposed to using a "cellular" connection
like 3G, 4G or LTE. The latest mobile device tracking suggests that device
preferences remain about the same, with slight growth in each category, leading
to greater overall mobile adoption and use. It will surely be interesting to
see how this trend continues in the coming days!
Be sure to subscribe
to this blog feed to see how the ecommerce season pans out, and
follow #AkamaiHoliday and @Akamai on Twitter to learn about more data and
trends as the holidays unfold.
Lorenz Jakober is Senior Product Marketing Manager at Akamai.
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