The Shopping Olympics have begun for this holiday season.
Online holiday sales will hit a record $83 billion, with Cyber Monday sales generating $3 billion, according to forecasts by Adobe. This year will also so an 11 percent year-over-year increase in online spending. This is the year of mobile shopping.
Adobe Digital Index’s 2015 Holiday Online Shopping Predictions revealed that more shoppers will be picking up their smartphones to shop even as they are finishing their turkey dinners on Thanksgiving Day, finding an average discount of 27 percent on merchandise. The survey revealed that Thanksgiving Day is the fasting growing shopping day for the second consecutive year, with mobile driving 51 percent of purchases and 29 percent of online sales being transacted via a mobile device, even as a growing number of retailers have announced that their stores will stay shuttered on the holiday. Adobe forecasts online sales to be up 18 percent year over year at $1.6 percent on Turkey Day.
Mobile will definitely be shaping the landscape of holiday shopping this year. Across the full holiday season, Adobe predicts that 11 percent of e-commerce will occur via a phone, and nine percent on tablets, and predicts that iOS will drive 22 percent of online holiday sales while Android will represent just seven percent.
In an email, Kurt Heinemann, chief marketing officer of Reflektion, an innovator in individualized e-commerce, weighed in on holiday shopping with the following forecast: “2015 is the year mobile will change the face of Black Friday and Cyber Monday – so don’t hold off your e-commerce strategy until Black Friday. In fact, we expect mobile browsing to account for over 50 percent of total e-commerce traffic on both these days.
“As recent data shows people begin the Black Friday shopping process by browsing on their phones on Thanksgiving Day, making consumers compelling offers on Thanksgiving will help them get a jump on their holiday shopping purchasing decisions. I believe that retailers who send less frequent, more targeted email promotions will have higher success than those who flood customers’ inboxes,” Heinemann asserted.
