Why mobile will impact holiday shopping

Ever since Amazon launched its mobile offerings (and Amazon Prime), slowly but surely my buying habits have shifted towards Jeff Bezos’ company which is on its way to become the new new Walmart. And I am not the only one.

The fact is that because we got easy to use shopping apps on our phones, we are all seeing a big change in our shopping behavior. The biggest manifestation of this trend is going to be during the holiday season this year, according to Google’smobile ads division. In a blog post, they predict some major gains for mobile-based shopping.

  • 15% of total “Black Friday” searches will be from mobile devices.
  • 44% of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices.
  • 65% of high-end device users report that they have used their device to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business in person.
  • Greater than 33% of both smartphone users and tablet users plan to start their shopping before Thanksgiving.

[POSSIBLE ADDITIONAL GRAPH] As we wrote about earlier, smartphones have turned into local shopping devices and during the holidays, the impulse to reach for your smartphone is even more powerful. With less time and more urgency to find gifts as the holidays approach, it makes sense that smartphones, already very intent-driven devices, will be become even more popular as shopping tools.

Elsewhere:

  • Forrester Research noted that tablets already account for 20 percent of e-commerce sales, despite the fact that only 9 percent of shoppers own tablets.

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